


Moths

by themantlingdark



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-13 20:14:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 41,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16899156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themantlingdark/pseuds/themantlingdark
Summary: Loki's secrets come to light after Thor goes to homecoming with Jane. Southern Gothic-ish High school au.





	Moths

  


1 Laying

 

Whatever may happen to thee, it was prepared for thee from all eternity; and the implication of causes was from eternity spinning the thread of thy being, and of that which is incident to it.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

The year 2000 arrived with more ease than had been anticipated after months of handwringing on the part of the press. Frigga found herself doing what she always did: frantically preparing for Fashion Week. Said week would eat up all of February, bouncing her between New York, Paris, Milan, and London.

By St. Patrick's Day, things were sorted and Frigga could breathe a bit. Odin would finally be coming back home to their apartment in New York that night. His house was still headquartered in Berlin, so he'd been in Europe all year. Frigga had met up with him a few times during the shows, but at this point, she hadn't seen her husband in three weeks.

At one o'clock in the morning she was reading in bed as she waited up for him when the doorbell rang. She snorted and wondered whether he'd lost his keys or forgotten to take them with him in the first place. She buzzed him in and leaned against the door frame while she waited, knowing he would take the stairs and their apartment was six flights up. When the elevator dinged, Frigga assumed it was Jen Griffin next door, back from celebrating at the bars. Instead, a young police officer turned out of it, said Frigga's full name, and apologized.

Frigga felt the sweat starting under her arms as her hands began to shake. She saw the fluctuations in the light from the fluorescent bulbs and heard their ugly buzzing. She saw the officer's tongue brush her lips and teeth as she spoke.

A drunk driver had blown a red light and t-boned Odin's cab as he was on his way home from JFK. The impact had broken his neck, killing him instantly.

Frigga remembered hearing sirens earlier and asked where it had happened; he'd been three blocks from their building.

The officer gave Frigga a few instructions and more apologies. Frigga thanked her, shut the door, and went to sit within the little cone of light from the reading lamp that was clamped to the headboard of the bed. She snatched the phone from its cradle on the nightstand, worried it could ring just like the doorbell had, bearing news that would ruin what was left of her life. She listened to the dial tone while she watched a pale spider make halting sprints across the table top until he disappeared beneath her alarm clock. She reached to drag her finger across the table in a path perpendicular to the one the spider had taken, hooking the invisible thread of silk she knew he had left in his wake. The tiny creature came skidding out of his hiding place, led by his behind, betrayed by his own precautions, scrambling to get a foothold and drop a new anchoring thread despite all the good the last one was doing him. Frigga released him when he was nearly at the table's edge, then watched him run straight back under the alarm clock. She sucked in a breath and dialed her brother.

Freyr's voice was clear and soft when he answered. She took a tiny piece of comfort in knowing she hadn't woken him.

“It's me,” she said, sounding strangled even to her own ears.

“S? What's wrong?”

“He's gone,” she answered, and she hadn't intended it to come out as a whisper, but it was all her throat would allow. “I have to go to the police department in a minute. Drunk driver-”

“Oh, God, S. I'm so sorry. Jesus, honey. I'll be there as quick as I can.”

“Careful on the roads,” she choked, and he said his customary goodbye.

She sat with the phone held limply in her hand, listening to the dial tone again, still reluctant to have the handset in its cradle.

A car honked on the street below and she flinched. She wanted to go downstairs and slap whoever had done it. One moment of silence didn't seem like too much to ask, but it was. She dropped the phone back into place and it bounced and clattered, but stayed in its seat. Her nightgown was stuck to her everywhere. Her whole body was covered in a skin of cold sweat. She mopped herself off with a towel and dressed as quickly as she could so that she'd make it out the door before anyone called.

Odin looked like he was sleeping on a steel table. Like he was pulling an awful prank. Frigga kept telling herself she was still in bed. That she had fallen asleep reading. She had always been a deep sleeper and a vivid dreamer. It was often difficult for her to tell. As a child, she would wake up on a Friday morning certain it was Saturday, having dreamed Friday the night before, and would go back to sleep. Half an hour later, her brother would bang on the door shouting that she was going to make them late for school if she didn't get up right this minute. She took up the habit of crossing the days off of a calendar on her bedside table every night to keep track.

It was getting light outside by the time she made her way home. She could see green vomit drying on the sidewalks through the taxi window. The flashes of images she caught from the moving cab followed the fractured path of a dream. It wasn't until she saw Freyr sitting on his suitcase beside the front door of her building that she knew she was awake. When she dreamed of Freyr, he was never with her in New York; she was always down in Georgia with him. And he never wept in her dreams, but tears were streaming steadily down his cheeks and all the pink from his lips had flown up to roost in his eyes.

After the funeral, Frigga settled her affairs and went back home to Ashton with her brother.

For the first few years that he had lived alone in their family home, Freyr fought a halfhearted battle with the century-old roses that were winding their way up the corners of the house. There were full verandas around the first and second stories, and the vines had chosen to use the posts as a trellis. After poking his fingers full of holes for three summers running, he switched tactics and fertilized the plants like mad so that they'd fill in and have better blooms. Each year, the square white house looked more like an overzealously frosted wedding cake.

The live oaks that lined the oblong loop of a driveway were bigger than Frigga remembered and did a better job blocking the view of the house from the road. The rest looked the same. Their home—Alfheim—was small compared to some of the apartments people kept in New York. A narrow ballroom took up the right third of the first floor. It was where Frigga used to dance and sew, as her parents had never had any interest in entertaining. Now she planned to turn it into a studio. The living room was to the left with the kitchen past it and the den past that. Upstairs, there were two bedrooms on the left with a full bath before them at the front end of the house, and a mirrored arrangement on the right.

The modesty of the place kept people from guessing how well-to-do its occupants were. The Vanirs were the oldest family left in Ashton. Their great great great grandparents emigrated from Norrland after the fire in Sundsvall in June of 1888 and took advantage of the low land prices in the American South. Arvid Vanir used his knowledge of manufacturing to mass produce condoms. In the twenties, the business made the switch from rubber to latex and their brand, Armor, was soon the nation's top seller. In the forties, they made a fortune when they landed a contract with the government and their condoms were sent out with soldiers so they wouldn't be downed by STIs. They made even more when they sold their plant to Trojan in the seventies.

The front steps creaked under Frigga's feet the way they always had. The prime spiderweb real-estate beside the lamp over the door was still occupied and bedecked with the tattered husks of moths. The house smelled the same as she made her way through it. Her nose caught that slightly sour musk of very old wood. The grass, oaks, roses, and red dirt that blew in through the open windows. The dusty animal scent of wool rugs and silk wall hangings. The oily lemon of furniture polish. Freyr's skin, Old Spice deodorant, and Ivory soap. Cotton dish towels. The tufted leather sofas in the living room with their ambergris and civet. Their mother's perfume, which was strongest in the kitchen. Their father's aftershave, which lingered in the living room. The ancient pipe smoke that was stuck on the ceiling over the staircase, out of reach two stories up.

 

In April, Frigga asked Freyr to go out on the porch to drink his beer, saying the stuff reeked. He looked at her like she was having him on, but she raised an eyebrow and then pointed at the front door.

“Go on, get,” she ordered.

“You cross with me, S?” he asked. He had called her sis instead of sister when they were little, but it had been further truncated to S when they were adolescents.

“No,” she said, wrinkling her nose and fanning her face with her hand. “I don't know how you can stand it. It's gone off. Doesn't it taste skunky?”

Freyr frowned and set the beer outside on the edge of the railing that ran around the veranda.

“Come here,” he said, and led Frigga to the bar behind the dining table.

He had her sniff gin, bourbon, vodka, and vermouth, all of which elicited whines and nausea. He knew there was a chance that she was associating alcohol with St. Patrick's Day, so he pulled spices out of the kitchen cupboards and had her sniff those. She groaned, pinched her nose, and ran out the back door.

He found her on the tire swing, drifting slowly back and forth.

“That doesn't make you feel sick?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.

“The breeze is good,” she said. “Helps.”

“Have a really light period recently?” Freyr asked, and Frigga's heels skidded on the patch of dirt under the swing where the grass no longer tried to grow. She swayed to stop. “So, that's a yes,” Freyr said. “And you've been sleeping a lot.”

She nodded.

“And you've been eating a box of cereal a day,” he noted, and she flipped him the bird. “What else have you been eating?”

“Apples,” she shrugged. “Those bagels I made you pick up... with cream cheese. Yogurt and berries. Hard-boiled eggs. Six kinds of chicken. Carrots cooked with butter and brown sugar. Um... Bananas. Melon. All sorts of things.”

“All sorts of bland sweet things, huh?”

“Yeah,” she agreed, climbing out of the tire and turning to frown up at her brother.

“And your breasts ache,” he said.

“You know they do. It's my favorite thing to complain about. It's why I smack yours first thing when you get home from work. It's only fair, us being twins and all.”

“Mmhmmm.”

“What are you mmhmmming me about?” she asked, narrowing her eyes and tipping her head, then squaring her shoulders and planting her feet like she was going to shove Freyr the way she liked to do whenever he was being a smart-ass.

“I think you might be eating for two.”

He caught her under the arms when she started to drop and then eased her down onto the lawn. She doubled over and he watched her shoulders shake for half a minute while short little sobs bubbled out of her. When he crouched low and scooped her hair up off her face to see just how upset she was, he found out she was laughing.

Three, as it turned out.

Freyr made Frigga eat real food. Still bland, but more than breakfast cereal. He would set her favorite nutritionally bankrupt groceries high up in the backs of the cupboards and then stand guard over them. She was tall. Five feet nine inches in stocking feet. But Freyr was still five inches taller, so it was hopeless. She would pinch him, prod him, kick him, poke him, and threaten to murder him in gruesome ways for five full minutes. He would laugh throughout, which would initially infuriate her, but inevitably infect her. Then she'd curse, catch her breath, and sit down to eat something green.

She didn't miss New York. Nor did she expect to. The social expectations and obligations of the city had created constant interruptions. And there was too much cement. Here, there was no one for miles. Over the years, everyone who'd been able to do so had left for Savannah, and the Vanirs had purchased every piece of property that had gone up for sale in Ashton. Their land had been slowly spreading out in all directions for over a century. They let it go wild. Everything was green. It was like stepping back in time.

When Freyr had finished med school he had come back home and opened a family practice. His office didn't accept heath insurance. Instead, the suggested payment for any service was five dollars. But that was just a suggestion. He kept a credit card next door at the pharmacy so that patients could get their meds. When word spread of Freyr's absurd hours—seven in the morning to nine at night—and his low fees, his business increased dramatically. Ashton was too small a town to support two of anything, so Dr. Banner lost most of his patients to Freyr within the first year. Freyr suggested they merge, and offered an absurdly generous salary. Banner heaved a sigh of relief; he hadn't wanted to move to a bigger city. Their alliance sped things up and split their workloads in half. Freyr worked from six in the morning to three in the afternoon, and Bruce worked from noon to nine at night.

Frigga had time and milestones on her mind. Marriage, death, and birth. She started designing wedding gowns. The dresses traversed the seasons much as Georgia did—gently and subtly, with little need for long sleeves. She'd sew or sketch while Freyr was away at his office and it would keep her mind off of the past until he got back home and took over the task of distracting her. All the knowledge sitting on the shelves in his head was dusted off and put to work. He'd tell her why he was making this or that for dinner. Which vitamins and minerals were in each ingredient and what benefits the babies would get from them. That she should do her belly a favor chew each bite of food as well as she could, because her digestive system was going to slow down, allowing it to wring every molecule of nutrition from everything she ate.

At the end of April, he set two pomegranate seeds on her plate.

“They're this big now,” he told her, and she hummed and smiled and stared for over a minute.

“I'm still going to eat them,” she said, picking them up with her fingertips and making good on her threat.

A week later, it was a pair of blueberries.

“Picture them with little arm buds,” Freyr told her.

“Do the arm buds taste like blueberries?”

The babies were kidney beans, cherries, kumquats, Brussels sprouts, passion fruit—“They have fingernails and eyelids now,” limes, nectarines, apples—“Their brains are controlling their muscles and you might feel them moving soon,” avocados—“They're probably sucking their thumbs or masturbating,” pears, sweet potatoes—“They have fingerprints,” mangoes, eggplants—“They recognize your voice,” and every other appropriate article of produce Freyr could procure from Ashton's markets.

 

December devoured the light until the days were as short as they could get. Frigga slept deeper in that extra darkness and cocooned herself in quilts while she left a window cracked to let cool air pour in over her cheeks.

She dreamed that she was waiting to go into labor, woke, then fell asleep again and dreamed of more waiting. Waiting was all she'd been doing with her waking hours, so it felt familiar. When she woke again, the water that had broken was nearly dry on the bed. A contraction rolled through her for over a minute, knocking the air from her lungs so that she couldn't even scream. It left her panting and grimacing. She shifted her position to prevent having a second one, as that had often worked in the past, but less than two minutes later the muscles flexed again.

She rolled toward the nightstand and picked up the phone to dial her brother at work. He was with a patient, so she asked Dylan to please have Freyr call her as soon as he was done and tell him that it was important.

When the phone rang, she was in the middle of a contraction and could only puff words into the phone.

“Slept– through it– I think– they're coming.”

Less than fifteen minutes later, she heard her brother's feet pounding up the stairs and then he was littering the room with the medical equipment that was gathered under his long arms.

By that point, she'd made a stack of pillows and blankets on the bed and was resting her upper body on those while she knelt on the mattress in a low wide stance with her enormous belly between her knees.

“This is the only position that doesn't piss me off,” she said.

“That's fine. Contractions?”

“Longer than the rests now. Ninety seconds. Thirty between. Break's almost over.”

“Girl, you could sleep through a goddamn hurricane,” he sighed, shaking his head and smiling, and then she was panting little rhythmic huh huh huh breaths for a minute and a half while he got everything ready.

He called the closest emergency room and asked if they could send somebody by just to be on the safe side, assuming twins would be tricky, but the babies were both at a breast by the time the EMTs arrived.

 

2 Feeding

The twins were plump cherubic blond things with bright eyes and the enviable habit of sleeping through the night—or at least keeping their thoughts to themselves until sunrise. Thor only cried if he was hungry or his diaper was dirty. Loki was a connoisseur of crocodile tears. She'd pretend to sob until someone picked her up, at which point she'd brighten and attempt to carry on a conversation, but it all sounded like wet goblin gibberish either way. Thor liked being carried around and taken for walks, while Loki preferred to be swaddled and spoken to. They were both enthusiastic and insatiable eaters, however, and Frigga was pleased – breastfeeding them allowed her to continue eating for three. Freyr would start cooking supper as soon as he got home from work and wouldn't stop for two hours or more. There were never leftovers. Frigga nursed the twins for well over a year, not wanting to lose the quiet pleasure of cuddling fat happy babies and not relishing the thought of resuming the meager eating habits of a solitary human being.

Freyr was in the nursery to witness Thor's first successful escape from the crib. He came over to provide a safety net in case Thor lost his grip, but he didn't interfere with Thor's progress. He was curious to see how far Thor would get without falling, and what he would do with his freedom.

All the way to the floor, and then not much, as it turned out.

Thor wanted to get back in the crib where his sister stood blubbering at him with her hands wrapped around the bars. Freyr took her out, too, and the three of them sat on the floor of the nursery while Freyr stared at the crib and concluded that the stupid thing was just a miniature jungle gym and escape was inevitable—almost invited. Freyr took a page from Finland's book and built an enormous baby box—the twins couldn't climb smooth walls.

When the twins began toddling, Frigga had nightmares in which the they fell from the second floor veranda or slipped between the posts along the staircase and tumbled over the side. Freyr installed plexiglass panels and put locks high on all the balcony doors. Frigga's nightmares stopped.

At age four, Loki liked to draw and listen to music if the sun was up. She could entertain herself all day, and often did so. She would sit at her low table in the corner of Frigga's studio, burning through boxes of crayons and stacks of paper. Thor preferred to be out in the yard—helping Freyr water the flowerbeds, making mud-pies, and spying on the wildlife. Freyr had to buy field guides to satisfy all of Thor's questions—What's that? What does it eat? Is that its nest? Does it bite? Can I touch it?

Preschool had been tolerable to the twins because they could draw and play all day – bathing dolls, drawing, and singing songs in a circle with the other children. Kindergarten was a disappointment. On their way into the building their first day, they saw what they thought was a huge wad of chewing gum stuck to the sidewalk. On closer inspection, it resolved into a flattened baby bird. The chick had fallen from its nest in the tree that overhung the concrete and had been trampled. The twins were in tears before they'd even crossed the school's threshold; they knew nothing good could come of this.

The building itself was mostly blocks and the floors were linoleum. No bouncy beams of old wood. No musky wool rugs. At home, the twins were beginning to read, but here they were endlessly forced to recite an alphabet that they could already say backward in their sleep. Everything smelled like disinfectant, but was grimy nonetheless. Loki couldn't listen to Bach and draw all day. Thor couldn't be out learning the names and habits of bugs and birds.

After the first week, the twins insisted to Frigga that they'd had more than enough and that it really would be better if they just stayed home for the rest of their lives.

Thor and Loki played fairy tale games in the orchard in the spring, dressed in the gold-trimmed tunics Frigga had made for them and carrying long branches for swords. They knocked a peach down from a tree with their weapons. It was so far from ripe it hadn't even been bruised by the beating they gave it to get it free. When they bit into it, it was hard and bitter, and they spat the little hunks of fruit into the grass for the ants. Loki said it tasted that way because it was poisoned and that they were doomed to sleep until a prince came along to kiss them. They dropped down onto their backs and waited for what felt like centuries—six minutes and twenty-four seconds—before Freyr turned up on the horse he was training and assumed they were napping. When they heard the hooves retreating, Loki hissed “You have to kiss us” in a stage whisper, and Freyr dismounted and delivered the twins from their curse.

“You're supposed to eat poisoned peaches one at a time so there's someone left to revive you,” Freyr explained, then ruffled their hair, tickled their ribs, and hopped back up on the horse to resume his lesson in leg commands.

Loki took another bite of the peach, turning her head afterward to spit the fruit as far as she could with a wet thew, then swooned. Thor sat, smiling and watching her. He kissed the back of her left hand, but she stayed under, so he kissed the right. He tickled the insides of her elbows with a blade of grass and saw her trying not to squirm. He kissed her forehead. Then her left cheek. Then her right. Then he sat up, still smiling.

“It has to be on the lips,” Loki said, speaking out of the side of her mouth like an inept ventriloquist.

Thor hummed and kissed her knees, which were still filthy from when they'd been crawling around playing unicorns half an hour before. He knelt next to her, biting his lip to stop his laughing, and leaned over and dragged his hair across her face. Her nose wrinkled up at how much it tickled. He kissed the tip of it to smooth it out again and then pecked her on the lips. She smiled but didn't open her eyes. He had to kiss her nine more times before she was restored, at which point she surged up and tackled him. Then they grabbed their sticks and had a thrilling sword fight, which, as ever, ended in bloody knuckles. When asked, they would always claim they got the cuts while climbing trees, because the knuckle injuries were the reason sword-fights-with-sticks had been forbidden.

The next day, they went back to the orchard and frowned up at the still-green fruit.

Loki sank down onto her back in the grass and stared at the tree branches. The leaves cast shifting layers of shadow on each other amid the glow of back-lit green, and they were all shot through with gaps of sky so bright they made her squint.

Thor stripped off his tunic to repurpose it as a pillow, settling beside Loki and asking for a story.

She thought for a moment.

“It was lucky Freyr woke us yesterday,” she began. “If we'd slept here all night, the fairies would have found us and taken us away forever.”

Thor hummed and huddled close to kiss her shoulder.

It was always the same story, Thor just never knew how they were going to get there this time.

Loki told him about the beautiful women with thick dark hair and bright green eyes who would come for them. The ladies would wear flowing white gowns that sometimes looked like wings, but were not, and they'd glide between the trees like ghosts, moving their feet to make it look like they were walking, but never really touching the ground. They'd carry the twins off to their castle, which appeared to be a pile of crumbling stones from the outside, but inside was solid and spacious, full of candles and cushions and crackling fires and candies. And the fairies would give them treats and braid their hair and kiss them on the cheeks. They'd undress their guests and pet them and tell them they were pretty. And they'd open up their dresses and hover over the twins, letting Thor and Loki brush the baffling hair between their legs and stroke their lovely breasts and bellies. The twins wanted those breasts to press against them everywhere. Wanted bright red nipples to tickle between their legs. They both favored women, finding men too dull and plain.

After Loki's stories, the twins would always feel an urgent need to examine each other. Thor would take a peek at Loki's little folds and nub, then cautiously reach out to part and palm them. After that, he'd drop trou to let Loki see his own round bouncing shapes, and she'd prod him gently once or twice with her grubby fingers. Then they'd nod, satisfied, as though they'd just cemented a deal with a handshake, and tug their shorts back up.

They liked their bodies. Pink and springy. The hair on their grown fairy women was a mystery to them and a fate they hoped to avoid. They didn't see how they could ever pee through curls without making a mess of themselves.

In August, Freyr caught them at their game, with their pants around their ankles, and asked what they were playing.

“Fairies,” they chimed, which, while inexplicable to him, was somehow reassuring.

He asked them if they both liked the game, to which they each gave an enthusiastic affirmative. He said that was fine, then, but they had to be careful not to hurt each other, and no foreign objects were allowed. Then he asked them if they knew what that meant.

“Nothing from France or China?” Loki guessed.

“Well, that's right in part,” Freyr granted, “but I mean nothing that isn't made of your skin.”

“Oh,” they echoed. “'Kay.”

Freyr tried not to laugh too hard at them and then left them to it.

The twins saw each other bare in the bath every night—and Thor frequently abandoned his clothes in the backyard—so the sights were nothing new. It was the unpredictable sensation of a touch that wasn't their own that pleased them. And the way Loki's stories came to life behind their eyes. The avalanche of imagery that crowded their heads, set off by her words. Their minds spoke the strange tongues of sex that children devise for themselves, inventing solutions to problems that had never properly been put to them.

Every afternoon, the twins would head to the center of the orchard and lie down in the grass. They'd trade movie-long kisses without parting their lips—tongues were slimy and mouths were full of spit, so they failed to see the appeal. Then Loki would conjure the fairies, and, for a while after the story had finished, the twins would lie still and let their own imaginings fill their eyes.

Loki wanted to cut off Thor's penis in most of her fantasies. She would wind him up in silky string to make sure that he'd hold still, and then she'd perform the surgery with her safety scissors. There would be no blood, just a shiny circle of fresh skin. It never hurt him; it just left him a bit docile and impressed, and he would look at her in a pleading way that she liked. And Thor would be brave and wouldn't cry, but afterward he'd be tired and weak, and she'd get to carry him around and take care of him.

Thor wanted to coat his hands in gooey Crayola finger paints and leave bright prints on every piece of his twin. Perfectly symmetrical, like a butterfly. He wanted to smear the red that he loved so much between her legs, painting her little pink folds with bright happy blobs of it. Then they'd press their fronts together and the paint on Loki would transfer onto Thor. They'd repeat the process with their backs and sides until they were wearing matching multicolored skins. Thus arrayed, they'd stamp their patterns onto everything—walls, rugs, upholstery, Frigga, Freyr, and the fairies. When they took their bath that night, the water would look like gasoline on a puddle, and afterward they'd be naked again, granting Thor a blank canvas.

First grade lasted all day instead of ending at lunchtime, and was therefore an even greater injustice than kindergarten—a point the twins made every morning over breakfast in the hope that Frigga would see reason and send them back to bed.

She would not.

The desks in their classroom were arranged in a semicircle around the chalkboard, so Thor and Loki would sit side by side and hold hands, carefully writing letters against each other's palms with their fingertips, holding slow conversations that were still an improvement on the speed of the day's lesson. Loki sat on the right and spelled with her left hand, as she'd always been ambidextrous. Thor kept a lookout, pulling their hands higher up behind the desk if it seemed like the teacher might see them. He began to learn to write with his left hand so that he could do his lessons without letting go of Loki. That lasted until Amora Slocum, who always sat on Loki's right, tattled on them and the teacher split up the twins. After that, Thor and Loki learned Morse code and blinked it back and forth at each other as they sat on opposite ends of the semicircle of desks. Amora went home with bubblegum stuck in her hair every day for two weeks straight until her father, sick of listening to all the screaming and crying as Mrs. Slocum tried to remove the pink goo, shaved his daughter's head with the electric clippers he normally employed to trim their poodle.

On the playground at recess, boys would run up and grab Loki, saying “Got you!” and hoping she would wriggle away so they could chase her. She would tell them to let go. If they did not, she would stomp their feet and knock them to the ground. She and Thor would exchange mystified shrugs, then go off to take turns pushing each other on the swings. They both liked to lie with the seat under their belly and their arms up behind them, holding the chains. Then they'd pull each other back by the ankles and let go. When they sailed forward, it felt like they were flying.

With the twins at school all day, Frigga had more time to work and she dipped her toes back into seasonal collections. In August and January she did hair and makeup tests on Thor and Loki, then took photos for reference and brought them to the shows with her so that she could give the stylists backstage an idea of what she wanted. Everyone in the fashion industry was soon well acquainted with the Vanir twins, who, unlike the models on the catwalks, were always grinning in their photographs.

Frigga's fabric remnants became Thor and Loki's costumes. They would pin the scraps around their bodies with plastic binder clips until they were wrapped in gauzy layers of tulle and chiffon that approximated the gowns worn by their fairies.

When the twins were in second grade, Frigga needed surgery and radiation to remove a lump in her left breast. It was caught early. Stage 1A. Thor and Loki spent a week staying with Sif, who lived with her older brother Heimdall. The kids wore themselves out playing home run derby every night on the baseball diamond that Heimdall built atop what was once a soybean field. After dark, he'd set off fireworks from the pitcher's mound, and then they'd watch the stars until they were tired. Heimdall would put them sideways in Sif's double bed to sleep. When he went to wake them for school in the morning, he'd find one heap of toothpick limbs and tangled hair in the center of the mattress. Sometimes it was sensible and tidy—Sif behind Thor behind Loki, all neatly spooning; sometimes they were stacked like kindling—at odd angles, with legs across bellies. In either case, waking them was as pleasant as poking a hornet's nest.

Frigga had radiation appointments five days a week for five weeks, but they were in the mornings while the kids were at school. It was like having a bad sunburn on her left breast and armpit. She kept the area dusted with cornstarch to prevent her skin from sticking to itself and to cut down on friction, but shirts were so irritating that she only wore them to her appointments. At home, she went around topless. The twins, who were going topless in solidarity, stared at her lumpectomy scar with something like awe, or possibly envy. They thought it made her look tough. “Like Frodo after he got stabbed by the Witch-king of Angmar,” they said. So Frigga showed them how to mix water, gelatin, and food coloring to make fake wounds that they could adhere to their skin with corn syrup. They went overboard and ended up resembling melted candles.

When Frigga's treatments were finished and she went back to wearing shirts, there was still a visible dent in the top of her left breast that the twins could spy through her clothes. She was never one for bras and wasn't about to start now. The twins were never two to keep their hands to themselves, and as soon as she was sufficiently healed, Frigga consented to their incessant request that they be allowed to pet the dimple. She tried not to laugh aloud at their need to mark this new patch of their mother as part of their territory. She was mostly successful, merely trembling with pent up laughter and turning red from trying to suppress her smile.

By the summer after third grade, the twins had largely pulled each other into one orbit.

While the sun was up, they went outside to check on the barn. Barn was an understatement. It was the sort of stable popular with the horse crowd in Kentucky. Brick floors with drainage channels built in so you could rinse everything out. Tall Dutch doors on the outer wall of every stall. Six stalls on each side. Climate controlled, with a feed room nice enough to live in.

Freyr had acquired a number of animals in the aftermath of the market crash in 2008. Old male goats weren't much use if you were interested in milk, so they were first to go; Freyr ended up with half a dozen. Horses were expensive, so many neighbors put theirs up for sale and Freyr went around collecting them.

The twins spoiled their enormous new pets with greens and apple slices and long scrubbings with the curry comb. Having sufficiently powdered themselves with horse-dust, they allowed the goats to abuse them for fifteen minutes, then made their way back to the pond that was past the old peach orchard in a small grove of willows. The tall grass tickled their ankles and adhered seeds to their socks as they ambled through it. They kept their eyes on the ground, watching for butterflies and snakes and seeing grasshoppers burst up in front of their feet. They could always hear the pond before they could see it: the frogs gulping their throaty twang, the insects buzzing, the call of the red-winged blackbirds who fluttered through the tall reeds.

The tadpoles were so thick that the water was rippling with them. Frogs shot into the pond from their unseen perches on the bank and sat motionless at the bottom, visible and vulnerable where they hadn't been before.

The twins stripped off all their clothes and cautiously climbed down into the water, letting the soft sludge on the bed of the pond ooze up between their toes. Pollywogs tickled their calves while dragonflies alighted on their hair and shoulders. Limbs were just beginning to sprout on the tadpoles; they now had tiny, rubbery, human-looking arms and bent froggy hind legs, all of which hung limply at their fat grey sides while their tails did the swimming. The twins knelt in the muck, sagging until the water was up to their armpits, then watched the tadpoles swim to and fro over their laps, rendering their seminal shapes dark and clear against the pale skin of bony thighs.

When the twins were finished soaking, they dried themselves off with their t-shirts and tugged on the rest of their clothes. Then they whipped their wet tops through the air to shoo flies and mosquitoes away as they wove their way through the trees and fields. Thor checked on all the known nests and burrows while Loki looked for new ones.

Thor had already raised a small army of orphans. He kept a battered and heavily annotated copy of Care of the Wild Feathered and Furred in his room, along with cages, terrariums, crates, ointments, bandages, eyedroppers, and bottles. After any storm, Thor would head out with Freyr and a wooden stepladder to see if any baby birds had fallen out of their nests and to make sure the structures had survived the wind and rain. If the nests were still sound, Thor would return fallen chicks to them, then wait to see if the parents came back. If the parents did not return, the babies became his. If a nest had fallen, he'd reassemble it, put it in a berry basket, and wire it to a tree, then watch to see if his handiwork was deemed acceptable. If the parents abandoned the nest, the eggs or chicks again became Thor's.

The twins spoke to each other very little when they were outside on their patrols, not wanting to frighten animals away and not wishing to distract each other. They would stop each other with a tap on the arm and direct each other's gazes by pointing their fingers—or aiming each other's heads by gripping their chins.

When they had completed their inventory of their world, they went back inside, where Loki would draw and Thor would sprawl in a beanbag chair beside her with a book.

In the spring of 2011 the twins were ten years old and finishing up with fourth grade. May had arrived and kids were counting the days until summer vacation. The classrooms were the dirtiest they'd get, smelling of sweaty palms, pencil shavings, chalk dust, and the milk that had splashed on the sides of trash can and soured. Attention spans were at their shortest. The world outside the window was at its most distracting, blooming and buzzing as the daylight lingered and the ground went soft.

At the end of the first Monday of the month, the twins were lying in their beds in the dark, miserable with the knowledge that four more days separated them from the weekend, and staring up at the stars on their ceilings. At Thor's request, Freyr had acquired a bottle of glow-in-the-dark paint, a fine-tipped brush, and a star map. Thor had dragged the stepladder up into his room, positioned the viewfinder to December twenty-first, and put the sky on his ceiling. Loki stayed in Thor's bed that night to see if the stars worked: they did. At Loki's request, Thor copied the stars onto her ceiling the next day.

Their matching ceilings did nothing to distract them that night; the twins were wide awake, drifting in the familiar unease that often crept up on them when there were walls between them. Thor was rolling out of bed to go see if there was a better breeze in Loki's room when a scream made him jump. He knew a screech owl when he heard one, and this was not that. This was guttural and broken. The second scream sent both of the twins out into the hall, where they more or less looked in a mirror, each seeing a small, wide-eyed, white-faced, shaking blond looking back at them. They scurried around the staircase and knocked frantically on Freyr's door, calling "Dad" in unison. He was almost always Freyrto them—they never addressed him as uncle—but when they were frightened, they'd refer to him as their father. He knew their habits and was worried well before he opened the door.

He found them pillow-mussed and sweaty, clad only in underpants, holding white-knuckled hands and half turned toward each other.

“Someone's screaming,” they whispered, and looked back over their shoulders toward the origin of the sound. Freyr went out onto the veranda with them and listened. Within a minute, he heard it too.

“Stay here,” he told them, then threw on clothes, grabbed his phone from his nightstand, and went downstairs.

The twins saw him step off the porch below and hurry out onto the lawn. The cone of light from his flashlight bounced ahead of him with his steps, fading and shrinking as he went to fetch something from the shed before starting down the long driveway. They could just see the screen of his phone when it appeared, glowing at his cheek.

Their mother joined them on the veranda a minute later and asked what all the fuss was about.

She made them come back in the house and wait in her room. They sat on her neatly made bed and she told them what had happened and warned of what would likely happen next.

It was one of those rare nights when Freyr wished he owned a gun so that this would all be over sooner. He knew what he was hearing. As it stood, he had to call Heimdall.

Freyr listened to the oblivious songs of the insects as he waited through two rings.

“Sorry to wake you,” Freyr said, when his friend answered the phone with a voice very rough from sleep.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, we're fine, thanks. Someone hit a doe is all. She's crawling up our driveway with a broken back.”

“Ah, shit. Okay. I'll be over in a minute.”

“Thanks,” Freyr said. “I'll start digging.”

Freyr had barely made progress on the grave when he saw headlights moving down the road. The high beams paused for five minutes, not far from the end of the driveway, then resumed and turned toward him, slowing to a stop twenty feet in front of the doe. A moment later, the beam from a flashlight swooped across Freyr's bent form.

“You're lucky you don't dig holes for a living,” Heimdall said, coming around the back of the car and getting a rifle out of his trunk. “That's the saddest thing I've ever seen.”

“I'm out of my element,” Freyr admitted, pushing his hair off his face with his forearm and feeling the sweat from both surfaces mingling. “Usually trying to prevent this sort of thing. Did I wake Sif?”

“Yes,” Heimdall admitted, “but I was going to wake her up and warn her I'd be gone for a minute anyway.”

“Well, sorry all the same,” Freyr sighed, and Heimdall waved him off.

“I've got good news and bad news.”

“That's terrifying.”

“The good news,” Heimdall began, as he loaded the gun, “is that I'm not going to make you do this.”

“Well, I appreciate that. Thank you,” Freyr said. He heaved another shovel-full of dirt out of his slowly deepening pit, then paused. “Jesus, what's the bad news?”

“We'll get to that in a minute,” Heimdall murmured, pushing foam earplugs into his head. “Ready?” he asked, looking over at Freyr, who stuck his fingers in his ears and nodded.

The gunshot still startled him. The copper smell of blood seeped into the humid night air, mixing with the scents of overturned earth, torn grass, and roses. When Freyr took his pinkies out of his ears, all the insects and toads had been stunned into silence. There was only the crunch of Heimdall's heels on the gravel of the the driveway and the springy clunk of his trunk shutting.

“Thanks again. The screaming was scaring the shit outta the kids.”

“I'll bet.”

“I owe you one.”

“You do,” Heimdall agreed. “Which brings us to the bad news.”

Heimdall opened the passenger door and leaned into his car. His broad shoulders were silhouetted against the dome light, and quite incongruous with the distressed bleating that seemed to be issuing from his chest. When Heimdall straightened and turned, Freyr could see a speckled fawn wriggling under each of his arms, long legs dangling and kicking.

“Thor's gonna love you forever,” Freyr sighed, and Heimdall nudged the car door shut with his hip. “You wanna bring 'em to up to the house? I'm filthy and I'm not half done digging this damned thing.”

“Sure,” Heimdall said. “Frigga gonna kill me?”

“If she does, I'll just put you in here with the doe.”

“Cozy.”

“Mmhmmm. Fresh lemonade in the fridge.”

“Don't mind if I do.”

Freyr wiped his hand on his pants and dialed his sister's cell phone to ask her to please go downstairs and answer the door, and please don't kill us, and please bring Thor.

The fawns spent that first night on a pile of towels in the space under Thor's desk, gulping warm milk from bottles held aloft in his happy hands. He scolded the babies with laughter as they greedily tugged at the nipples, and he imagined their poor late mother's teats suffering the same rough treatment.

In the morning, Frigga called the school to say the twins were sick, which happened every spring and had never once been true, then went out to buy up all the goat's milk in the markets, farms, and grocery stores for twenty miles.

By the end of summer, the deer were tame. They took up permanent residence in the barn, where they formed a weird bond with the horses and made a habit of defending the twins from the more abusive affections of the goats. They showed no interest in the world beyond the pasture, which Thor felt was wise. Frigga said she knew they wouldn't be going anywhere because they thought the sun shone out of Thor's behind—a belief Thor fortified by bringing them canned pumpkin and fresh banana for breakfast every day.

The next spring was stormy, and Thor had a lot of birds—robins, sparrows, crows, doves, titmice, and wrens. His front was perpetually speckled with the tiny purple droplets of berry juice that the chicks sprayed onto him as they shook their faces clean after meals.

Loki didn't have the patience to put up with the fussy eaters—or the flung food and feces. She started sewing with Frigga and soon took over the task of making the costumes that she and Thor wore when they played. For her first attempt, Loki turned them into Ringwraiths. Freyr was ecstatic. He'd always been a Tolkien fan, and had introduced the twins to his obsession at a probably-too-young age, amid much groaning and eye-rolling from his sister. The dark robes Loki sewed were loose and shaggy and simple compared to the replicas of the Celeborn and Galadriel costumes that Frigga had made for them a few years earlier. Still, they looked as good as the real thing. Freyr took hundreds of pictures of Thor and Loki on horseback in their Nazgûl robes and gave them both gold replicas of the ring, saying, “Now you can take them to Sauron.” They said "No, we'll keep them," and then lost the things almost immediately, which delighted Freyr even further.

The family mausoleum on the back end of their property was their Minas Morgul. Freyr put green light bulbs in the tarnished brass wall fixtures for them. There were triangular stained glass windows on the peaks of the walls at either end of the building, depicting sunrise and sunset, matching east and west, with red skies over green fields. There were still six empty crypts in the southern wall where coffins could slide in.

“Just enough room for all us,” Thor said, examining the chambers and wondering which his grandparents wanted and which his parents preferred.

“Won't be anyone around to put us in there,” Loki murmured.

Thor hummed and followed a fat spider across the floor, eyeing its enormous abdomen with the intensity of a hungry bird.

“We have a Shelob.”

“I think we have more than one,” Loki huffed, peering up into the recesses of the ceiling and seeing the haze of cobwebs everywhere.

The spring after that, Thor missed most of the last two weeks of sixth grade because he had a nest of hummingbirds who needed to be fed every twenty minutes. They lived in a sling that hung from his neck so that his body could keep them warm. Thor had scraped the nest off of the rose vine it had been adhered to after he noticed there was no longer anyone sitting on it but it was still full of eggs.

Loki was in love with the nest. A miraculous piece of weaving. It was bound together with spiderwebs and had bits of leaves and rose petals woven in as camouflage. The spider silk let the nest stretch as the babies grew; Loki wished she could make something half as clever.

  


3 Metamorphosing

 

The twins were getting skinny and sulky. They complained about school for an hour if Freyr asked them how it was going, so he learned not to.

Summer was hot even by Georgia's standards, and the twins spent all their time in the pond.

In August, Freyr took the family to the ocean for the weekend; Frigga needed a break from her studio and a moment of peace before September's Fashion Weeks were in full swing.

Freyr made everyone wear wide-brimmed hats, t-shirts, and buckets of sunblock. He was grateful that it hadn't yet occurred to the twins to wish to be sexy; they still wanted to be comfortably free from blistering sunburns, so they complied without issue. As they swam, Thor and Loki remained submerged in the ocean for spans of time that made Frigga and Freyr nervous, for they couldn't imagine how the twins could hold their breaths so long. The answer was that they couldn't; they traded a breath or two beneath the waves, relieving their lungs of the stubborn urge to breathe and making their game of mermaids feel that little bit more believable.

As they drove home Sunday night, their mother asked them what they liked best about the weekend, keen to hear something other than complaints out of them.

Loki hummed and thought about it.

“You liked the sound of the sand buzzing under your feet,” Thor reminded her. “And you couldn't stop staring at the sky.”

“Yeah,” Loki agreed. “I've never seen it so big before.”

Thor smiled and went back to gazing out the window.

“What about you?” Freyr asked, glancing at Thor through the rear view mirror.

“He loved the waves,” Loki answered. “Body-surfed nonstop. Smiled the whole time. Bet your teeth got a sunburn,” Loki teased, turning to wink at Thor, who nodded his head.

“It still feels like I'm bobbing up and down in the water,” he admitted.

Loki pressed the pad of her finger into the flesh on the back of Thor's hand. When she lifted it, the spot was bright against the tan Thor had accumulated in spite of SPF. Their long hair had been bleached by all the time spent outside that summer, highlighting it with that impossible white-blond that belonged to Swedish toddlers. Loki's curls were coiling tighter. Thor's hair was getting wavy. Their bodies were getting harder. Taller and leaner. The big-eyed, lollipop proportions of childhood were melting away with their baby-fat, leaving sharp elfin shapes in their wake.

In Late October, Loki nearly stopped speaking. When she was called on in class, she never had the answer, and Thor would have to whisper or signal it to her.

Frigga and Freyr assumed it was just the hormonal whirlwind of puberty hitting its stride, since the twins were nearly thirteen now.

Loki spent the Saturday after Halloween sitting on the couch beside her mother, staring at a blank page in her sketchbook and twirling a lock of hair on the right side of her forehead between her fingers until the curl was oily and limp. It went on for three hours and Frigga was torn between the desire to laugh and the urge to scream, but both of them were ultimately overpowered by her wish to avoid driving Loki away, for this was the most sociable she had been in a week.

“Mom?”

“Yeah, hon?”

“I found a lump.”

“A lump?” Frigga said. She heard her book hit the floor and felt the blood drain from her face. “Where?”

Loki pointed to the left side of her crotch and Frigga blinked.

“When?”

“About a week ago.”

“Okay,” Frigga said, and took a slow steadying breath. “I'll call Dr. Banner.”

“Can't you and Dad check first?” Loki asked. “In case it's nothing?”

“All right, sweetheart,” Frigga sighed. “Let's see.”

Loki nodded and looked around the house, craning her neck to see out the windows.

“They've only been at the barn for fifteen minutes,” Frigga said. “Thor won't be back any time soon.”

Loki wiggled her jeans halfway down her thighs and then stretched her underwear low enough that the lump could easily be seen. Oblong and almost an inch and a half in diameter. Even tumors weren't that quick.

“Does it hurt?”

“Only if I squish it.”

Frigga nodded and Loki tugged her pants back up.

“Is there anything else about it?”

Loki shook her head no.

Frigga went off to the barn to fetch her brother. She told him about what she had seen as they made their way back to the house. He had his best smiling bedside manner about him when he came inside.

Loki repeated her demonstration and Freyr nodded and said if it was all right by Loki, he'd like to head into the office so that Dr. Banner could do an ultrasound.

“I'm not pregnant!” Loki squeaked.

“I know, honey,” Freyr soothed. “Ultrasounds let you look inside any body, not just pregnant bellies.”

“Oh, okay,” Loki said, and breathed a bit more easily.

Freyr went back to the barn to fetch Thor and they got cleaned up and drove into town to let themselves into the office. He and Bruce would stay on call on weekends, but most of the accidents for the year were waning with the end of farming season.

Dr. Banner had already arrived and he had a room ready for Loki. Thor sat in the waiting room, pretending to read magazines. He switched seats and turned his head in every direction, straining to hear, but he couldn't make out any of the words coming from the other room until Loki screamed “What am I?”

Thor sat with his knees shaking until the door opened an hour later. Loki was sobbing. Her face was red and drenched with it.

When they'd made it halfway home and Thor still hadn't been told what was going on, he gave up on waiting.

“Are you sick?” Thor asked, leaning across the back seat toward his twin.

Loki just kept crying.

“No,” Freyr said.

“Then what's wrong?”

Frigga pushed her hair off her face and said that medical things were private.

“Did you get your period?” Thor whispered, but Loki shook her head and only sobbed harder.

Thor tried to be patient, but he and Loki had never had secrets before, and it made him sleepless, which gave him more time to dwell on everything and worry himself into dark corners. It had been three days and Loki was still crying all the time.

Thor knocked on Loki's door and listened to the footsteps crossing the room. She only opened the door six inches, but Thor could easily see that her eyes were bloodshot and puffy. Her bed was rumpled from her lying on it. She hadn't gone to school that day.

“Are you dying?” Thor breathed.

“In a way,” Loki choked, as her face crumpled and fresh tears started.

She shut the door.

Thor ran, sobbing, straight to his mother in her studio, where she was putting a bolt of fabric back on a rack.

“She's dying?” Thor wailed.

“What?”

“I asked her if she was dying,” Thor bawled, mashing his face into his mother's sternum. “She said, 'In a way'.”

His whole body was shaking and he was starting to fall. She could feel the drag of him all down her front.

“God Almighty, you two are something else,” Frigga said, looping her left arm under his armpit and hoisting him up as she petted his hair with her right hand. “She is not dying,” Frigga said, firmly.

Thor let out a long, stuttering sigh, warming his mother's neck. His tears were running down her chest, under the neckline of her t-shirt, and into her navel. His ragged breathing shook her body. His left hand was fiddling with the belt loops of her jeans while his right was fisted in the jersey at her left shoulder. His arms were still not supporting their own weight. Frigga could feel the fabric of her shirt stretching and the waistband of her blue jeans dipping at her hip.

“But that's as much as I'm going to tell you," Frigga warned. "It's Loki's business, not yours.”

Frigga punished Thor for—and distracted him from—his nosy woes by making him work as her mannequin for the rest of the night. The twins were now the same size as most runway models above the waist, though their limbs were a bit short. Frigga frequently employed them for fittings, standing them up on crates so that the dresses wouldn't drag on the floor.

Freyr had a call the following Saturday morning, so Thor asked Loki to help him in the barn.

When she finally came downstairs, she was wearing a grey and green striped jersey dress and had her hair down in perfect curls.

Thor grabbed the banana and dish of canned pumpkin that had been waiting on the counter top for the last twenty minutes and Loki slipped her feet into her black rubber boots before they tromped out to the barn.

Loki was currently not crying and not in her room, so Thor thought the better of commenting on her wardrobe choices and instead tried to think of things Loki could do that wouldn't ruin her clothes.

Thor broke the banana in half and fed it to the deer, then let them lick his fingers clean. Loki held the dish of pumpkin for them and they emptied it in a matter of seconds, then looked up at her to see if there would be more, just as they always did. She gave them a grateful neck-scratching to reward their constancy.

“You wanna feed 'em and I'll muck?” Thor asked, and Loki nodded and starting distributing hay and pellets.

Once they had groomed the horses, they opened all the doors to let everyone out for the day.

They held a small bale of hay between them and carried it out to the rack in the pasture, swinging it up into place on the count of three. Loki filled the tray beneath the bale with more pellets and then the twins stood and watched for a while. The deer and goats began their traditional morning battle, butting heads and hurling themselves at each other. The horses broke into sprints and bucked and kicked. The sky was clear and the sun made things comfortable for November. Georgia's bounty of snakes would come out of the ground to warm themselves in the patches of light that filtered through the half-bare trees.

Once the deer had defeated the goats, they bounded triumphantly over to Thor, swishing their tails with pleasure while their velvet ears bounced like wings. Then they nibbled his hair and sleeves and pushed their foreheads into his stomach until he scratched them.

Loki snorted and Thor smiled.

“How come you like mothering things so much?” Loki asked.

“I don't like things dying when they don't need to,” Thor shrugged, still rubbing the deer behind their ears. “You don't like it?”

“I just don't have the patience,” Loki said, shaking her head. “They always refuse to eat. It's so stupid. You're trying to save their lives and half the time they don't want to let you.”

“We're scary to them. And they're usually just babies—they don't know any better. At least not at first. But I finally figured out the trick.”

“What trick?”

“To get them to eat,” Thor said. “Now I put a little brown sugar in their food the first time I feed them, and after that they don't fuss.”

Loki grinned.

“You like playing with the babies, though, don't you?” Thor asked.

“Yeah, that's the fun part,” Loki said, ducking her head and smiling again.

“Letting me do all the dirty work, huh?”

“Busted,” Loki confessed.

Thor patted the deer on the rump and then he and Loki let themselves out of the pasture and walked back to the house, picking bits of straw and hay from each other's hair and clothes and smacking the dust from their sleeves.

“How come you don't sew?” Loki asked, seeing their mother through the window, working in her studio.

“I dunno,” Thor admitted. “I've never liked the sound of the machine, or the needle stabbing so close to your fingertips.”

“Yeah, it's nasty,” Loki agreed. “But it beats doing it by hand.”

“What's the fun part?”

“Making stuff that's never existed before. And being able to make us look different.”

“Like with the costumes?”

“Mmhmmm.”

Loki spent the rest of the weekend sewing simple autumn dresses that she could throw in the washer and dryer without worry. Thor spent it fussing over a garter snake that had been caught and dropped by a hawk and had thereby acquired a hole in its side and a crook in its back. The hole healed; the crook did not. Slithers became a permanent resident of Thor's large terrarium.

Freyr's roses were still stubbornly blooming a week later, greeting the Vanirs as they came and went with perfume rendered brighter by the dearth of other scents in the air. The twins were out in the woods gathering fallen leaves and sorting them into sacks by color. Loki was going to make a series of dresses—one yellow, one orange, one red—that would later decay. Her hope was that if she stitched them all together just so, the veins of the leaves would remain intact, making matching skeletons of the gowns with their tiny branches. Thor was following her instructions, collecting and gauging the foliage—and chewing the stems of the sassafras leaves that were deemed unfit for inclusion.

Loki would often catch Thor staring at her, as if he could will her secret out of her head and into his own.

“Feeling okay?” was as close as he would come to asking.

“I'm not sick,” was always her answer.

And Thor would smile and frown at the same time.

The twins agreed that seventh grade was the worst yet. Lessons were as boring as ever, but now the students were getting self-conscious and cruel. Thor had never cared about casual fashion. He wore jeans or cotton shorts and t-shirts with a flannel or a hoodie over them if it was cold. There was often straw stuck to him from the barn. His hair was down past his shoulders while the longest the other boys would allow theirs to get was to the napes of their necks. If Thor's mother tested makeup ideas out on him, he never managed to wash everything off entirely, so he'd often have black smudges left between his eyelashes and across his lids. Loki thought he looked like a tiny Kurt Cobain. Thor let her dye his hair pink with Kool-Aid to heighten the effect. Thor heard a lot of whispers in the hallways after that, none of which were aboutNirvana.

Loki flew through it relatively smoothly. She was better dressed than anyone else in school, visibly hated being there, never volunteered to answer any questions, and her perfect blond curls made her look like Taylor Swift. Thor had thought that that turn of events would put her in a good mood, but she was often sharp with him. If he wrapped his arm around her as they walked to the bus, it was “Don't—I'll smell like your deodorant.” If he sat too close when they took their seat, it was “Scoot over—you'll wrinkle my dress and get me dirty.” If he asked her to play home run derby, for she was by far the best pitcher, it was “I'm working on a dress.”

In the spring, Loki insisted she wouldn't be swimming that year; by June, she had changed her mind. She sewed herself a bathing suit with long sleeves, a hood, and a knee-length skirt, then sewed a similar top for Thor to wear with his trunks.

“So we won't need to put on sunblock and contaminate the pond with it,” Loki said, and Thor grinned and kissed her forehead and told her he loved her brain.

Freyr got them goggles with snorkels and they spent the hottest part of the day face down in the water, seeing their hair slowly waving where it hung down around their faces and watching the tadpoles change. Sometimes the birds would bathe by walking down the twins' backs, taking advantage of the islands that had been made by their floating bodies.

A week into their swimming, Thor draped his arm over Loki's shoulder as they walked to the pond, then braced himself for a scolding, but no objection came. After supper, he joined her on the sofa where she was sketching. He made sure to sit on the skirt of her dress, crushing it against the cushion and pressing wrinkles into it with the heat of his skin. She turned and raised her sketchbook; he waited for the smack.

“Which one do you like better?” she asked, holding her designs up for him to judge, and he cautiously opened his eyes.

“The one with the hem above the knee,” Thor said. “Mid-calf always makes legs look stumpy.”

“I know,” Loki sighed. “I want to switch things up with my silhouettes, but floor length feels too formal for school, and anything shorter looks awkward until it gets to the knee.”

“Mini skirts.”

“I'll flash everyone when I sit down in front of them.”

“Wear shorts or fill them with tulle,” Thor shrugged.

At midnight in early August, Loki heard Thor's outer doors open and shut and then the dry scuff of his feet on the grey painted floor of the veranda.

“You awake?” Thor whispered, speaking through the screen, and it was soft enough that it wouldn't have woken her if she had been sleeping, which put him in her good graces.

“Yeah.”

“Getting any breeze?” Thor asked.

His voice was nasal and thick, and his speech was slow with wanting sleep.

“Some,” she said. “You c'n come in if you want.”

The door clicked twice and then the bed sagged. Thor had his hair tied in a knot on the top of his head to keep it off his skin, but in the dark it looked like he was balancing an egg up there. He was all ribs and elbows, wearing nothing but wilted underpants. She could just make out the knobs of his spine where he was curled away from her in the dark.

“Want the sheet?” she asked.

“No. Thanks, though.”

All the curtains were open to welcome any movement the air was willing to part with. Not much. The faint gusts of Loki's breath against Thor's back were providing the bulk of the wind, but it was pleasant.

Loki drew Thor's shoulder blades with the tip of her index finger while his sweat collected under her nail. The tickle of the touches made Thor's skin feel cooler and he hummed.

“'Snice,” Thor slurred.

“Mmm,” Loki agreed.

She kept sketching Thor's skeleton until she fell asleep.

The next night, Thor rapped on Loki's door again. She said "Come in," and he walked around the bed to slip lightly in behind her, still smelling of the shower he had taken an hour earlier to cool off and the powdery spice of the deodorant he'd smeared under his arms.

“'S your turn,” Thor whispered, and tugged at the back of her shirt.

She raised her ribs from the mattress so that he could bunch the thin cotton up under her armpits.

She heard him take a deep breath and then cool air spilled down her back as he forced it quickly through his lips, nearly whistling. His fingers ran over her skin for so long she fell asleep before he did, half-dreaming of the way his hands coaxed wet hatchlings to open their beaks for their first taste of crushed berries.

Morning was cool. The only part of the day that would let them escape from sweating. Loki rolled over carefully and pulled the sheets up to their chins. Thor was out cold, eyes darting back and forth beneath his lids. The last gossamer wisps of baby-blond hair still clung to his cheeks and the nape of his neck, looking like the silky coats worn by orchid seeds, catching the sunlight and trapping it against his skin. He had pulled his hair out of its bun at some point in the night, but left the strands resting over his head on the pillow. It made all of his features look longer and thinner and lifted at the edges. Pointed, and of a piece with his ears. Ageless and fey.

When Thor woke up, the sun was coming in over Loki's head and hitting Thor's right eye, making the blue look like a tiny portal to a bottomless sky. Loki watched as Thor propped himself up on his left elbow and leaned over to look at her. She turned her head to match him. The sun was sideways through Thor's eye at this angle, making the iris glow so brightly it surpassed the white. He reached for her chin with his right hand and turned it slightly to her left. She could feel the sunlight cutting through her lens the same way it was slicing through Thor's. It made her iris look like the shallow water at the ocean's edge. Thor stared down into her sea foam circle as she gazed unblinking back into his blue. His head sagged and the green and blue rings got bigger until they filled the twins' fields of vision and Thor set a soft pink kiss on his sister's lips that tasted like the salt of the night's sweat and the weekend they spent at the sea.

Eighth grade was better, socially speaking. Nearly everyone had cell phones at that point, and they were preoccupied with those. It was easy for students to avoid each other online, and they did so. The twins were getting taller, their bodies staying in step, though they were still shorter than Sif. Loki would stare at her. Sif was usually dressed much as Thor was. She had the sides of her head shaved and was pretty in spite of herself. She was forever being given detention for finishing fights that other students started. Games of home run derby were dependent upon the weather and whether anyone had picked on Sif that day, so they were few and far between.

The twins felt lighter the second they stepped off the bus in the afternoon and heard the gravel of the driveway crunching under their feet. The live oaks that lined the path to the door wore garlands of Spanish moss that lent them a hazy look. Old and unhurried, like grandmothers in shawls. By the time the twins made it into the house, they were both more relaxed than they had been at any point during the school day.

Freyr was always fixing dinner. The scents of herbs were overlaid on the rhythmic knocks of his knife against the wooden cutting board. The sensory combination kept the twins tethered to the kitchen table.

Thor would do their math and science homework; Loki would do history and English. When those were done, they'd glance it all over and make any necessary clarifications or corrections. For their book reports, they would each write two papers. Then Thor would go through one of Loki's essays deleting adverbs, adjectives, and catty comments while Loki would go through one of Thor's essays adding adverbs, adjectives, and snark. Afterward, they'd print them all out and swap.

Then they were free.

Loki was making more complicated dresses. High-waisted and with full skirts and button fronts. Thor was dividing his time between wandering around outside, acting as Loki's mannequin, and reading scientific journals. Fall didn't bring many babies for him to raise; only the occasional mourning dove chick, for the birds built flimsy nests—just piles of sticks—and mated all year round.

When Thor woke up the next Sunday morning, his sister was sitting on the edge of the bed beside him. He scooted back to make room and then propped a couple pillows against the brass bars of the bed frame so that she could sit up more comfortably.

“Cold?” Thor asked, bending to tug the quilt over her feet regardless. Loki gave a noncommittal hum. Thor got their grandmother's wedding quilt. Loki got Frigga's. Frigga had said if they didn't enjoy the things now, they'd end up rotting in boxes and going to waste, and she would rather see them ruined by use.

“Freyr get called?” Thor asked, wondering if they needed to hurry down to the barn.

“No.”

“'S wrong?” Thor murmured, curling up beside her and taking a calculated breath—slow and with his nostrils spread, trying to catch the scent of her that was hidden under lotion, perfume, laundry detergent, and wool.

“What's it like?” Loki asked.

Thor squinted to ask for clarification.

“Being a boy,” she said.

Thor's eyes went unfocused as he sifted through his head, seeking the answer for his sister. Sometimes his gaze would briefly go clear, but then his mouth and brow would twist and he'd get all cloudy again. This went on for many minutes. Thor had always been thorough.

Finally, his face went smooth and his vision sharpened, lifting until it locked with Loki's.

“You already know,” Thor said, and Loki went pale.

“What?"

“Or I know what it's like to be a girl. We've done almost all the same stuff... apart from the sewing and the babies.”

“Right,” Loki said, and the pink bled back into her cheeks. “But what's it like in your head?”

“Oh,” Thor breathed. “I've never kept track.” He sagged into his pillow and pouted a bit, disappointed in himself for this unanticipated failure, then brightened and smiled. “I could start, though,” he offered. “Write it all down for you.”

Loki grinned and nodded.

“Is it okay if I wait until tomorrow? It'll give me something to do in school.”

Loki was distracted all day on Monday, watching the clock, waiting to get home and read Thor's journal. He used a spiral-bound notebook so that it would look like he was doing his classwork. Loki could see him scribbling in it all day.

They did their homework in Thor's room that afternoon, pausing frequently to stare out the window at low rays of sunlight that were making the treetops glow behind the barn.

When they were finished, Loki asked for the journal and Thor slid off the bed to fish it out of his bag.

He sat beside Loki on the bed as she read it, watching her eyes weave back and forth across the pages.

I've been here ten minutes and I've wanted to go home the entire time.

Tara Redder has the best collection of blue jeans. They're all heavy-weight denim, but she wears them until they're soft and fitted and faded. She has it down to a science. I feel like sandpaper has to be involved. I want to ask her if there's a trick to breaking them in. It seems like something you could use, but asking would probably be creepy—she'd know I've been looking. When she runs her fingers through her hair, the section they combed slides diagonally down the back of her head in three neat rows that slowly return to their starting position. Its the most hypnotic thing I've ever seen. And I can smell her green apple shampoo when she does it. Does mine do the same?

Why don't they teach us something useful as long as they've got us here? Like how to do our taxes. Or how to plan nutritionally complete meals based on our age and size and how to cook them. Or how to read music and play cello. Or how to have sex.

I miss tank-top weather. I love seeing everyone's arms and shoulders.

Your hair is exactly the same color as Mom's. Sometimes I do a double take on days like this when you brush out your curls. You look like her twin.

Mrs. Lee can't spell, which doesn't matter that much since she's the art teacher, but she can't draw or paint, either.

Steve is sitting in front of me. If I set the tips of my thumbs together and spread my hands out to the sides, the span of my fingers is wider than his shoulders. He asked how Dr. Vanir is doing. I have a feeling he sees Freyr as often as we do.

The hems on his t-shirt have worn through at the edges. I've wanted to take him home and hide him in my room for eight years.

I miss when we were in grade school and we made construction-paper mailboxes to tape to our desks for Valentine's Day. It was easy to give him things then. As long as I stuck the same stuff in the rest of our friends' mailboxes, he wouldn't get mad.

Loki looked up when she was done reading and found Thor's eyes already waiting for her.

“I think about sex a lot,” Thor said, quietly. “I put all that stuff at the end so you wouldn't have to see it if you didn't want to.”

Loki nodded and flipped to the back.

I want to get spooned all day. And all night, but I'd probably sleep through that part, so it would have to go on all day, too, so I'd be awake to enjoy it.

I want to kiss someone's toes, shoulder blades, and hipbones. And I'd put hickeys on the backs of their knees.

What if everyone in here was covered in hickeys everywhere under their clothes all the time?

Pretty sure everyone in this class goes to bed alone every night. They probably don't know what it's like to feel someone's breath on their neck. We've been lucky.

They should turn the gym into a bunch of rows of tiny private rooms with beds in them, like a sleeper car on a train, and let students go in there on lunch breaks to cuddle and make out and have sex. I bet Mom and Freyr would donate the condoms for it. It would be better for us than dodgeball.

I want someone's hair to fall down around my face when they're on top of me, kissing me.

I want someone to sit on my face while I lick them. I want to know how I'd breathe, though sometimes I'd want them to smother me until I had to push them away.

I want to lie face down in bed while someone masturbates onto my ass and then smears it all over my skin.

Homework is such a stupid waste of life. I want to hide under the table while someone does their math and then stuff my face between their legs and suck on them until they're done with their assignments, to make it up to them for being stuck there doing algebra when they're in their prime.

I want to give someone a bath on the dining room table. Just a bar of soap, a bowl of water, and a naked body. I'd cover them in lather and rub them everywhere for hours while their skin was wet and slippery. I'd probably have to turn the heat up really high or do it on a hot day so they wouldn't get cold.

Everyone's hands are so amazing right now. Such long fingers. I always imagine them sliding down the front of my jeans and reaching into my boxers.

Maybe if we had an orgy in the lunchroom the school would ask us all not to come back.

Thor heard the faint tattoo of laughter puffing out Loki's nose. His shoulders relaxed a little.

Loki set the notebook aside and flopped down on the bed. Thor followed suit and they stared up at the faint yellow dots on the ceiling that would resolve into stars when dusk gave way to darkness.

“What goes on in your head when you're picking out what to wear in the morning?” Loki asked.

“Oh, sorry, I skipped all that stuff. Um. I usually sniff it to see if it's clean-”

Loki snorted and shook her head. Thor blushed a little.

“I always wear fresh boxers,” he defended. “I check the weather sometimes the night before, so I'll know if I should bring sweatshirts. There's a hole in the wall in the back corner of the art room by the emergency door.”

“That's why it's always so cold in there?” Loki boggled, and Thor nodded.

“Steve has goosebumps from October to April. Sometimes his teeth chatter. Last winter I made him wear my hoodie. He said no til I pointed out the hole in the wall. I think he thought he was the only one freezing his ass off in there.”

Loki shook her head and added another item to the very long list of reasons she hated school.

“Your wardrobe,” she directed.

“Right, sorry,” Thor said, scrubbing a hand through his hair and leaving frizzy gaps where his fingers had been. “I mean, I'm gonna wear it to the barn, so there's not much point in worrying about it. Damh and Eilid are gonna wipe their noses all over it and then the horses will get it all dusty.”

“You could change after you got done in the barn,” Loki noted.

“I'd have to get up earlier,” Thor frowned, shaking his head. “Mostly I try to pick stuff that still fits. Feels like everything is shrinking on me all the time.”

“Yeah,” Loki agreed. My skirts keep getting shorter.”

“My favorite jeans look like flood pants now.”

“You'll have to go to the mall,” Loki said, and Thor whined and curled up into the fetal position, knocking his knees against Loki's left thigh and butting his forehead against her shoulder.

“How do you choose what to buy when you shop for clothes?” Loki asked.

“I just look for what fits. And it has to be easy to wash and sturdy enough to survive the barn.”

“Colors?” Loki asked.

“Dark jeans,” Thor shrugged. “Mid-tone tops to hide stains.”

“What about your hair?” Loki murmured.

“I like it long. It makes my face look a little smaller, so my eyes seem bigger. And it hides how thick my neck is,” Thor said. “Does it look bad?”

“No, you look like Andreja Pejic.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks,” Thor said, and popped a kiss on Loki's shoulder. “Think I could pull off a smokey eye?”

“Definitely.”

In June, Thor got up with the sun every morning to feed his barn swallow and robin chicks, whose muddy nests had all melted in the spring rain. Then he ran to the barn to do his chores, took a quick shower, returned to his room, and went straight back to sleep. Loki staggered out of bed at eleven every day and shrugged on one of the thin cotton dresses of which she'd made herself a dozen. They were frilly fitted high-necked things inspired by the one Grace Kelly wore in High Noon, but with short cap-sleeves, hems at the knee, and only one layer of fabric dressed up with a few lace accents. She met Thor in the kitchen, where breakfast and lunch—enormous bowls of overnight-oatmeal full of berries and nuts, and Greek yogurt studded with pomegranate, respectively—were consumed in quick succession. Ever since Frigga's cancer diagnosis, Freyr had steered the family steadily toward whole foods and away from refined, processed things. The twins were young enough when they made the switch that they didn't miss much. They longed for Ritz crackers and Halloween candy, but not enough to sneak them.

The house was still cool from the night air, but the hazy gold glow out the window warned that it would be hot by two. Frigga was frantic with wedding gowns and Freyr was busy stitching up farmers' fingers. Summer seemed strangely quiet to the twins. Like the moments before a thunderstorm arrives, when all the birds stop singing and seek shelter deep in dense trees while the sky goes dark and green. Games of dress-up and dragons had ended for no reason either sibling could remember, but neither of them could muster the interest in resuming them, though they felt unmoored in the absence.

Loki ordered a Kryolan Vivid Aquacolor Face Paint Palette and an MUFE Flash Palette and she and Thor spent the rest of the summer painting each other's faces, designing makeup based on their interests. Thor came up with a collection of looks inspired by the Birds-of-Paradise Project. He stuck colorful paper cut-outs on Loki's face with eyelash adhesive and painted bright curving shapes onto her skin. His designs were always asymmetrical, but he'd balance the flash of wing feathers on the left with an elaborate brow or vivid blush on the right. Loki had been looking at minimalist art. She painted cobalt lines beneath Thor's eyes, following the angles at the outer corners up into the hair at his temples. She put circles on his cheeks that were the exact color of his lips, and the same diameter as his eyeballs. She mapped the bones of his face with tiny gold lines. She traced the edges of all of his features with the brown of his eyebrows. She gave his lips the black of his pupils and his cheeks the white of his eyes. She went over his veins in lavender. When Freyr got home from work in the afternoons, the twins always looked like Mardi Gras had mated with The Met.

The first time these makeovers had happened, Freyr had read the ingredients in the makeup and started frowning, but Frigga had glared at him from behind the twins' backs and said she loved what they'd done and wanted pictures of everything they got up to. Freyr went off to fetch his camera. He had the photos printed out life size and put them in pretty frames for Frigga to hang on the walls of her studio. The twins had entered that phase in which young people prefer to avoid being photographed, but they felt more comfortable with it when they could hide behind their makeup. Frigga would settle for any shots she could get, not wanting a huge gap in her photo albums.

The twins slept ten to twelve hours a day, but there were still shadows under their eyes. Their limbs felt heavy all the time. They hated losing their vacation to sleep, but couldn't summon the energy for much else. After supper, they'd take pillows, books, and blankets out onto the veranda, where they'd sit beneath a mosquito net, enjoying the breeze. Freyr would find them there after dark, cocooned in their mesh cage, tipped over on their sides, asleep.

  


4 Emerging

 

Loki began wearing makeup to school in the fall. Subtle, but no less stunning for it. She plucked her eyebrows into neat arcs and penciled them lightly. She put on dark brown mascara that showed off how long her eyelashes really were—half an inch—where before the tips had been an invisible blond. She pushed plum shadow into her upper lash line, setting off the green in her eyes and making the outer corners appear to lift with little flicks of her brush. She mixed a tiny bit of rosy lip pencil with some moisturizer on the back of her hand, then swirled it on the apples of her cheeks as blush. She'd wear lip gloss, but no color, as her mouth was red enough. Her skin looked dewy and her eyes seemed as wide as a doe's.

“Witchcraft,” Thor had pronounced, the first time he'd seen her handiwork, smiling as Loki handed him his backpack before they walked to the bus. He'd only seen her in their wild runway looks prior to that point, and they tended to overwhelm her face a bit, as they were mainly about color, pattern, and arresting the eye. This makeup had the opposite effect, directing Thor's attention to what belonged to his sister, highlighting her features with subtle tricks of shape and color.

Thor was wearing long skinny jeans every day, having braved the mall after all his other pants became capris. His t-shirts were the same ancient faded v-necks he always wore. They'd been laundered to transparency, letting the perfectly symmetrical coins of his nipples show through when the light was just right. His new height made the shirts look shorter and more fitted, and he was glad to come by stylishness accidentally, having no interest in seeking it out in stores. His hair was a third of the way down his back. It swung at his chest and floated behind him slightly as he walked, seeming to reach toward the people plodding along in his wake as he made his way through the halls. Loki's hair behaved in much the same way, but the curls seemed to beckon strangers' fingers in turn. Thor would often see people reaching for his sister's hair on some unconscious instinct, then pulling their hands away and blushing when they remembered themselves, quickly looking around to see if they'd been observed.

High school baffled the twins. They were meant to have acquired school pride at some undisclosed location. They attended their first pep rally, during which they sat on the gymnasium bleachers amid the entire shrieking student body, reeling at the ugly sounds and wrinkling their noses at the ever-present stink of fifty years' worth of dirty gym clothes and sweaty feet. At one point, the marching band played, and they nearly threw up at the cacophony. It seemed there was to be a “spirit week” in early October. The twins sagged when it became apparent this had nothing to do with ghosts or Halloween, but they brightened slightly when they learned that costumes would nevertheless be involved.

Monday was Toga Day. Loki wore a gathered empire-waisted goddess gown and a lot of gold jewelry. She rolled her curls around the edges of her head and pinned them up in the back, then tucked a few of Freyr's roses in the top of the bun. It wasn't a toga, but, she looked like a Greek statue, so the teacher still counted her as having participated in Spirit Week. Thor asked Frigga for a couple yards of spare fabric. He wrapped it once around himself, pinned the front and back together over his shoulders, pinned the opening at his left hip, and tied a red ribbon high around his waist. The hem was just above his knees and the open slits in the left side showed flashes of his ribs, hip, and thigh when the linen swayed. He didn't wear underpants because he thought they'd look stupid peeking out on his left. He wore simple tan sandals that he borrowed from his mother.

Loki saw Tadzio every time she looked at him, which made her want to march him right back to his bedroom before the Aschenbachs of the world had a chance to set eyes on him. Her wish was more or less granted; Thor was sent home at the top of first period because the fabric of his toga was too sheer, especially with the light behind it, and the slit in the side was wide enough to make it very obvious that he wasn't wearing anything underneath.

“Just get changed and come straight back,” the teacher called, as Thor all but skipped out the door.

Thor and Loki both laughed aloud at that.

The high school was across the street from the far northwest corner of their property. They could walk to it quite easily, but rarely did so, as it would have meant having to wake up an hour earlier. They would occasionally walk home when the weather was good—or when they'd run out of patience and opted to skip class and sleep in the orchard.

Tuesday was Pajama Day, but that was more intimacy than either of the twins felt inclined to extend to their classmates, so they didn't bother. And they had enough trouble staying awake in school as it was.

Wednesday was Crazy Hair Day. Thor put his hair up in foam rollers and left it that way. Loki sprayed, teased, wired, pinned, and twisted hers until it was floating over her head in defiance of gravity.

In second period, Thor was smiling out the window at a pair of doves mating on the tree branches. Jane Foster was in the seat behind him, bent over her textbook, which had the latest issue of Nature open on top of it. Her hair was hanging down in front of her face and she had arranged it with her fingers so that it formed a tent that hid the journal.

The teacher's droning was just white noise until Thor discerned a “Mr. Vanir?” spoken loudly at the end of it. The tone implied that Mr. Wesson thought he was being clever—catching Thor off guard—and that he thought he was being disrespected, having long ago deluded himself into believing that what went on in his classrooms had anything to do with him.

Thor replayed the droning in his head for a second to sift out the question: “And what can you tell me about the Big Bang, Mr. Vanir?”

“That it might never have happened,” Thor sighed. “Ahmed Farag Ali and Saurya Das proposed a theory that uses Bohmian quantum trajectories instead of classical geodesics, so the paths of the trajectories never cross to create singularities. The initial singularity is what the Big Bang is supposed to have come from, so if there's no singularity, there's no Big Bang. And the quantum corrections give the universe a finite size and an infinite age, so, again: no beginning, no need for a Big Bang. Been wondering what it means for black holes. Still waiting to hear more,” Thor finished, trailing off a bit.

Jane was staring at the back of Thor's head. Ali and Das were not mentioned in the textbook. Their paper was published too recently to appear in anything owned by the school. When Jane looked at Mr. Wesson, his face was as blank as his mind. She and Loki snorted in unison. Thor let out a disgruntled sound when he found that the birds he'd been watching had finished their mating and flown away.

The constipated tension that had been suffocating the room evaporated and the thirty-odd young bodies stuck sitting in the desks resumed their fantasies of holding other young bodies to their own. Mr. Wesson went back to reciting the contents of their ancient textbook and providing the white noise against which their waking minds could dream.

When class ended, Jane cleared her throat and tapped Thor on the shoulder before he got up from his seat.

“Are you going to homecoming?” she said.

“No,” Thor admitted. “Haven't been asked.”

“May I take you to homecoming?”

“I'd be honored,” Thor winked, smiling. “I don't have a tux or a suit, though,” he admitted.

“I don't have a dress,” she shrugged, and scribbled numbers on the edge of her notebook, then ripped out the little rectangle of paper and handed it to Thor.

Thor texted her so she'd have his cell number and they said their goodbyes and hurried off to their next classes.

Thor called his mom while he was on his way to the cafeteria to tell her he'd been asked to the dance. She said that was lovely and that she'd whip up a shirt and vest that he could wear with dark jeans. She told him he could borrow a tie from Freyr if he wanted, and that there was no point in a jacket because he'd just get too hot and take it off. She told him to have Jane come over after school if she wanted a dress.

Students were allowed to leave campus to eat lunch, so Loki told Thor she needed "girl-stuff" and walked into town to the beauty supply store. Thor ate with Jane and invited her over for a fitting with his mother.

Thursday was Twin Day, when students dressed alike. Thor had left his hair in curlers from the day before. He got up early, did his chores, and took a shower afterward, wearing a shower cap to protect his hair. When he took out the rollers, he laughed. He'd never looked more like his sister—or his mother, for that matter. He found his hair moved differently against his shoulders, rolling and tickling at shifting points along the coils of the curls, and he could feel the ringlets bouncing with their own weight. He walked, dripping and wrapped in a towel, down the hall to Loki's door, slowing occasionally to look at the pictures of his babies that Freyr had framed and put on the wall.

“May I borrow a dress?” Thor asked, knocking lightly. “I think I could fit in one of the stretchy ones.”

Thor's ribs were slightly wider than Loki's, but Thor didn't have breasts, so he figured it would all balance out.

Thor waited, listening to the patter of the water that fell from his skin and splattered on the rug.

When Loki opened the door, he didn't recognize her. She'd dyed her hair black overnight.

“Wow,” Thor said. “Going dark for fall, huh?”

Loki took in Thor's face, which wore an expression she had never seen on him before, and nodded.

“Looks amazing.”

She had run mascara through her eyebrows to make them match the rest of her hair. Where before she had looked like a Rococo portrait, all hazy and soft and harmonious, she now had the merciless clarity of a Renaissance painting. Her face was long and pale against the black frame of glossy curls. She looked taller and older. The gold had gone from her skin without the blond of her hair to echo it. The cool tones that arose from her veins were dominating now, and the resemblance she bore to her family was confined to her height and her eyes.

Thor shook himself out of his staring and went off to brush out his curls and call Jane to ask what she was going to wear that day: jeans, boots, and a red plaid shirt over a grey tee. Thor asked her to do her makeup the way she usually did—just subtle brown shadow and light mascara—and said that he'd copy it.

Jane came over again after school that night so that Frigga could get a final fitting and finish up the dress. She sat at the kitchen table with the twins doing homework while Freyr fixed dinner. He'd been Jane's doctor all her life, and she felt relaxed talking to him.

October had come in quietly, doing a winning impression of September, staying warm and dry and letting everyone leave their windows open at night more often than not. Perfect sleeping weather under most circumstances, but at one o'clock on Friday morning Thor was still lying awake in bed, running through all the conversations he could have with Jane at the dance that night and reminding himself not to step on her toes. He heard the click of Loki's door opening and he listened for the bathroom door shutting, but was met instead with footsteps on the stairs. When there were no returning footsteps a few minutes later, he rolled out of bed and followed his sister.

The lights were all off downstairs and Thor wondered if he had missed the sound of Loki slipping back into her room until he noticed the line of yellow light under the doors to Frigga's studio.

Thor let himself inside and saw Loki bent over Jane's dress with something shiny flashing at her fingertips.

Loki heard the doorknob springing back into place and checked over her shoulder. Thor's lips were open in a tiny pout and his forehead was wrinkled. He was squinting in the light, but his face wasn't puffy from sleeping.

“What are you doing?” Thor asked.

“Fixing something.”

“Mom made it.”

Loki's palms clammed up. She felt her chest shaking with each of her heartbeats.

“You think you know better than Mom now?” Thor huffed, walking closer.

“You don't have shoes on,” Loki warned. “Get out of here.”

“What are you doing?”

“Get out, before you step on a pin.”

Loki could hear the footsteps continuing behind her as she brushed away the cut threads. She pictured the straps of the dress giving way and lovely Jane's lovely breasts popping out to say hello to all of Ashton High.

“Why are you undoing all her work?” Thor asked, close enough that his breath made Loki's hair flutter, tickling her shoulder.

“Get out, Thor.”

“You cut half the stitches in the seams of the straps.”

“Get out.”

“Why would you-”

“Get out!” Loki snarled, spinning around to drive the ripper into Thor's left side as she raised her knee and slammed it into his crotch.

Thor crumpled, gasping, then scrambled to get his legs under himself so that he could rush to the trash can. Loki watched as Thor retched, coughed, and spat. She could see tears leaking out his eyes.

“Thor,” Loki pleaded, walking closer, but Thor held up his hand and shook his head no. He rose unsteadily and turned to leave the room, shutting the heavy doors behind him with a soft click.

Loki checked the table, the floor, and then her own hands, but didn't see the ripper anywhere. She leaned over to look in the trash and gagged at the steamy stench of vomit that was floating up out of the can. Loki held her breath as she tied off the bag. Then she hauled the sack outside to the caged bin on the far side of the shed.

The toads and insects were singing and trilling, oblivious to the injured boy in the kitchen and indifferent to the guilty girl in their midst. The wet grass painted colorless strokes onto Loki's ankles as she walked around the house. The dusty wings of moths brushed against her as they fluttered through the darkness, leaving shimmery silver scales on her arms and cheeks. Her flesh pulled up into goosebumps when she passed through threads of spider silk. They caught on her eyelashes and tickled her face as they trailed behind her with the breeze of her walking. She stood on her toes in the flowerbed beside the veranda and peered in through the west window. Thor was rooting around in the freezer. There was a dark spot shaped like an egg on the white of his tank top above his left hip. The stain was slowly spreading, shifting from sparrow, to mockingbird, to robin, to crow. She wanted to stuff the fabric into her mouth and suck Thor's red copper taste from the cotton.

Thor's hand came out of the ice box with a bag of peas and he knocked it against the counter a few times to break apart the clump. Loki looked up to see if Freyr would wake at the sound, since she'd heard it through the window, but there was nothing. Thor grabbed the dish towel and wrapped up the package. Loki waded through the lawn and around to the next window, watching as Thor walked slowly into the den. She saw him tug his pants and underwear down, gingerly examine his testicles, sink very slowly onto the sofa, and set the make-shift ice-pack on his crotch. The insects sang louder the longer Loki stood, quickly growing accustomed to her quiet breathing. She watched Thor's face until his head fell back against the cushions.

It only took Loki an hour to mend the straps, but she stayed up for another hour afterward, flapping and twirling a towel through the studio with all the windows open in an effort to dispel the sour stink of bile so that it wouldn't be there to greet her mother's nose in the morning.

Thor was gone when Loki came out and looked for him in the den, but the ripper was on the kitchen counter. The blade was black and sticky and there were brown fingerprints on the blue plastic handle. She could feel them beneath her fingertips when she picked up the tool and brought the metal to her mouth. She sucked it clean as she walked back to the studio, turning out lights as she went, and locking the front door. She licked Thor's tacky blood from the handle and rolled the flavor over on her tongue. Exactly like her own, but better because it was his. Seeing no more smears on the tiny knife, she blew it dry, snapped its cap on, and set it back in its bin. She inflated a fresh garbage bag, dragging it through the air like a windsock before sailing it down into the can. Then she checked the floor for blood, switched off the light, and went back up to bed to catch three hours of sleep.

Thor didn't speak during breakfast, which was nothing unusual, but he didn't make eye contact with Loki either, which was a first. He didn't tell Frigga or Freyr about the minor stabbing or the vandalism, though, and Loki told herself that was a silver lining.

Birds were awake and busy overhead as the twins walked down the driveway to wait for the bus. Loki often felt mocked by them. They reminded her that all the other species on Earth were going sensibly about their lives, not throwing away the halcyon days of their doomed flesh by rotting in cinder block buildings. Not filling their heads with uselessness until they'd run out of room to remember that the moon was once made of cheese. That if you lied on your back and hoisted your feet up into the air, you could walk on the sky and the ceiling. That your knees and fists made excellent hooves. That the version of you that lived in the mirror moved through the backward version of your world and had a wildly different life. Perhaps with a brother who was currently speaking to her.

Thor was walking at a quick pace, keeping ahead of his sister. His head was down, not following the paths of the birds. His arms were crossed over his middle instead of swinging at his sides.

“I fixed the seams,” Loki called.

Thor kept walking and made no indication that he had heard.

“She's planning to apply to Cambridge, Oxford, and Imperial,” Loki continued, watching Thor's head for a reaction and seeing none. “Says they're the best for astrophysics. Can't wait to get to London. Hates it here.”

“I know how she feels.”

On the bus, Thor slid onto the taped up vinyl seat beside Sif, who gave Loki a mean look when she passed. Throughout the ride to school, Thor was silent and his face was expressionless. Sif tossed her arm around him and he let himself sag into her as they both leaned to the left to stare out the window, bouncing against the steel wall of the bus as they sped down the dirt roads.

In first period, Thor took the desk behind Jane, which was the last one in the row, leaving Loki alone at the front to watch the spittle gather into foam at the edges of Mrs. Stone's mouth.

It was School Colors Day. They were meant to wear the yellow and brown of the eagle that was their mascot, but they hadn't remembered, and wouldn't have bothered if they had.

As soon as they got home, Loki said she wasn't feeling well and went up to her room. Thor wondered if it had anything to do with her mysterious medical condition, then remembered it was more likely related to the half-inch deep hole in his side.

Freyr drove to Savannah after work and came home with a corsage for Jane and a boutonniere for Thor. After dinner, they packed up the dress, laying it carefully across the back seat of the car so it wouldn't wrinkle. Thor briefly tested the integrity of the seams of the straps, tugging them lightly and examining the stitches before deeming them sound. He saw movement out of the corner of his eye looked up to find Loki standing just inside the double doors that opened onto the second story veranda. She was in a long white nightgown, watching him, with her pale face framed by the lattice and her body half-lost amid the reflections of the trees. She raised her right hand and pressed it to the pane beside her head. Thor couldn't make out whether it was hello, or goodbye, or help.

Freyr took Thor to the Fosters', who invited them both inside to wait for Jane to get changed. They sat in a living room full of overstuffed furniture and smiled at the framed science fair ribbons and photographs of a tiny goggle-clad Jane grinning beside increasingly sleek model rockets in the middle of a plowed-under cornfield.

When Jane came out, her mother made a strange sound, and Thor was briefly worried that Jane would be in trouble. Frigga had checked the weather and found that it would be warm, so she did a gauzy bronze gown that picked up the colors in Jane's hair and eyes. The straps twisted over her shoulders, then straightened and widened to span her breasts. The neckline was nearly to her navel, and the openings at the sides and back dipped just as low, meeting up at a thin gold belt. There was a peachy beige liner inside the gown that ended halfway down her thighs, but the rest was sheer, allowing the folds of fabric to create streaks of varying opacity below.

“I don't believe this,” Mrs. Foster sighed, shaking her head, and Thor braced himself. “My Jane in a dress. Hell's gonna thank you for the weather, honey.”

Thor started breathing again and Freyr and Mrs. Foster took so many pictures Thor was certain the batteries in their cameras would run out. Jane was hoping they would.

The Ashton High cafeteria had been decorated for homecoming with streamers and paper poufs that favored yellow over brown, to the relief of all attending. Thor had hoped it would start quietly, but the music was already playing when he and Jane walked in. Everyone was on their feet dancing while their dress shoes put blisters on their heels. It made Thor think of preschoolers putting on their parents' clothes and pretending to be grown.

Jane guided Thor through a couple of dances and then tossed her head in the direction of the doors. She slipped off her strappy slingbacks to keep from making noise. They tiptoed through the halls, behind chaperone's backs and across cold linoleum floors, until they were at an unmarked door near the boiler room. The door was locked when Jane tried it. She pulled two bobby pins from her hair, then bit off the plastic bits at the ends and spat them out with a quick breath and a flick of her tongue. She straightened the pins, told Thor to keep a lookout, and bent to pick the lock.

Thor's eyebrows went up, surprised but approving.

“I get so bored,” she said, blushing, then opened the door and led him up to the roof.

It was quiet. They could see for miles in the dry air, though there was little to differentiate the distances. Just the few streetlights scattered around, marking the intersections of the main roads, and a faint glowing dot to the east that might have been Loki's bedroom window.

They looked up at the stars. Thor knew all the myths for the constellations; Jane knew the names of the individual stars and how far away they were.

The breeze blew Thor's hair across his cheeks and tickled him. Jane had put hers up. He could smell the sticky bitter-sweetness of her hairspray, with its hint of shellac. Their faces were a dull muddy orange from the fluorescent lights out in the parking lot. Thor looked wispy. He was all verticals, with his hair down in its tousled waves and his grey herringbone vest carrying the dark line of his jeans all the way up to his shoulders.

“Are you going to study astrophysics?” Jane asked, and he laughed and shook his head.

“I'm counting the days until I don't have to be in a classroom.”

“You don't want to go to college?”

“No,” he answered instantly, and she looked angry. “I want to keep learning, but I don't like school.”

She nodded, though she was still scowling.

“So, what do you want to do?” she asked.

Thor stared up at the sky for a moment before he managed to meet her eyes.

“I like wildlife rehab,” he said, quietly.

“Can you actually earn a living doing that?”

“No,” Thor laughed. “Though I raised a couple crows and they bring me things sometimes.”

“Really? Like what?”

“Anything shiny or blue.”

“So, like, crushed cans of Labatt's?”

“Pretty much,” Thor laughed.

“They bring you garbage.”

“Treasure,” Thor corrected. “They did return some rings my sister and I lost.”

“Don't you need a biology or veterinary degree for that kind of work, though?”

“No, there's no requirement. But I wouldn't want to cut anybody open anyway. I just like raising the babies, and helping the broken ones get better.”

Jane nodded and nudged him with her shoulder.

“I guess that does sound pretty good,” she admitted.

Thor was in a fine mood when he got home, but it faded when he went up to his room and changed out of his clothes. The slit in his side caught his eye, and when he rolled his testicles in his hand, they were still slightly tender.

He thought Loki liked Jane. Well enough, anyway. Loki had made the bulk of the conversation with her when she'd come over to do her homework yesterday. And they must have talked about college when Thor was in the bathroom.

He'd only been in bed for five minutes when the veranda doors clicked open and the papers on his desk curled back and fluttered in the breeze.

Loki was still in the same nightgown. Thor had never seen her wear anything like it before. Long and trimmed with lace around the low neckline. He could smell the silk. Pale satin, like a pearl. She was bright in the dark.

“Something you'd like to say?” Thor asked.

“I'm cold,” Loki answered, with her arms crossed over her chest.

Thor huffed and shook his head.

“Get an extra blanket from the linen closet.”

“I want to stay here,” she whispered.

“You can't.”

“Since when?”

“Since you stabbed me.”

“You started it.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Thor snarled, hissing the words through his teeth and launching himself out of bed to put his face in front of hers.

“You're ruining everything,” Loki accused.

“You're the one ruining things,” Thor said. “Did you think about how it would look for Mom if a dress she made fell apart?”

Loki offered no answer to that. Thor grabbed her by the upper arm and marched her to the door, letting them out into the cool night air and half-dragging her back to her bedroom. The rattle of leaves and the flutter of the wind soothed him a bit and he loosened his grip on her arm a little.

“You're the one doing it,” Loki argued, voice high and beginning to break as they walked into her room. “You're falling for it. Turning into one of them. Going to homecoming and bringing that-”

“You dressed up last week, too,” Thor cut in, pulling Loki's blankets back with his free hand and then pointing at the mattress to order her in.

“I didn't go to school when I didn't have to,” she said, shaking off his arm and then shoving him. “I didn't leave you.”

“It was four hours,” Thor sighed. “You spend longer in Mom's studio sewing without me all the time. I spend longer in the barn on the weekends.”

“It's not the same,” she insisted, and followed at his heels as he went back out onto the veranda.

He stopped so that she'd stay in her doorway and he wouldn't have to drag her back as far a second time.

“We've always-” she began, but she choked up. “I thought you-” she tried, but her voice broke and her face crumpled. “How can you just throw it all away?”

She stood with her eyes closed, and her features clamped tight, shaking her head. Her arms were down at her sides and her hands were clenched into fists.

It was lighter outside than it had been in their rooms, and Thor could see her curls swaying at her chest. They moved easily from side to side across the satin, unimpeded by breasts. Thor squinted his eyes and tilted his head, wondering if it was a trick of the light or something in the construction of the gown. But no matter what he did, his sister's body remained flat.

“Loki?”

She opened her eyes and found Thor's face just inches from her own. His eyes were wide and his fingers were damp and shaking when they closed gently around her shoulders.

“Was it breast cancer?”

“What?” Loki breathed, then looked down at herself.

She wrapped her arms around her chest, took a shrinking step back into her room, and shut the doors.

Thor tapped, but she didn't answer.

He felt too hot. Sweat was trickling down his sides from under his arms and catching in the waistband of his pajama bottoms. He left his doors open when he went back to his room, then sat on the edge of his bed and watched the curtains billow and the papers wave on the desk as the wind gusted over his arms and ankles.

He couldn't place it. There was no point in the past during which she'd been away long enough to have had surgery and recovered from it. There had been no trips to the hospital for radiation. No hair falling out with chemotherapy. No breast cancer, then, Thor realized. He still had no idea what, if anything, she'd been diagnosed with two years ago.

Loki had had a steadily expanding bust for over a year now, always there beneath her bathing suits and dresses. Or appeared to have, as Thor now amended. It occurred to him that he had never seen them bare, and that everything his sister made for herself had high necklines.

The breasts she'd had at school that day were B cups. Probably. Thor found it impossible to tell, since cup size changed with rib circumference, bra design, and manufacturer. It was one of the thousand useless measuring systems that attended women's clothing and infuriated his mother. Thor supposed Loki was self-conscious about being flat-chested and having been caught stuffing her bra or wearing falsies or whatever she'd been up to. Perhaps she'd been bitter about Jane's bust and the way the dress would show it off. The thought soothed him a little and he scooted back into his bed. The air was comfortable with the breeze blowing in. He didn't need the quilt. Just the sheet and the knitted cotton blanket over his feet. Loki hadn't come to his room because she was cold.

Thor stared at the stars on his ceiling and sifted through his memories of the past two years, sticking pins in the little fluttering pieces of truth that had slipped out of his sister, realizing he could just as easily have called them fears.

  


5 Fluttering

 

Thor was still awake when dawn came. He watched his glow-paint stars fade slowly into the ceiling. When they had vanished, he pulled on day-old clothes that bore the stale scents of dust and skin and went down to join his parents for breakfast.

Frigga and Freyr were going to head to Savannah for their annual kick-off to the Halloween season. They'd poke through the city, shopping all day, and end it with dinner at The Olde Pink House in the famously haunted Planters Inn. When they came home, they'd have treats from Chocolat Atelier for the twins, one of Freyr's few allowed indulgences.

Thor saw them off and then went to the barn to do the more in depth cleaning and maintenance that he never had enough time for on weekday mornings. It was still clear and sunny outside, and the leaves made a crisp whispered rustle when they shook on the branches and cartwheeled across the lawn. Spiders were spinning everywhere, fattening up before the lean season, and Thor couldn't take fifty steps outside without feeling the strands of their silk catching on his skin.

There was no sign of Loki when Thor came back inside three hours later. He hadn't seen her through the window, working in Frigga's studio. There was no movie playing on the TV in the den. There were no dirty dishes on the counter. Upstairs, the shower curtain was still dry from the day before and the porcelain was dull with soap scum and water stains. Thor opened the bathroom window to keep the steam to a minimum and to enjoy the warm weather while it lasted.

Thor didn't sing in the shower. His sister always did. He'd hear the pipes clanging with the roaring rush of the water and then her voice would ring out against the tiles that were on the other side of the south wall of his room. He wondered if she knew he could hear her. She had first attempted Jolene, but the notes had been too high. So she went with Always Crashing in the Same Car, which sat comfortably within in her range. After that, there was a week of Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down). The Tracks of My Tears followed and got off to a rocky start, but within three weeks it was, in Thor's estimation, perfect. The sounds were round and soft, like Loki's words always were, and the hint of sand in her voice let her do a remarkable imitation of Smokey Robinson. Roy Orbison's Crying, which was all over the place and had a lot of loud sustained notes, took more than a month, and when Loki finally landed it, Thor wanted to burst into the bathroom applauding. For the next few weeks, Loki worked herself all the way up to You Can't Do a Thing (To Stop Me), which was far higher than she needed to go, and frequently made Thor shiver. After that, she breezed through the originally intended Dolly Parton number. From then on, whenever Loki was called on in class, Thor heard a hint of Dolly's warbling squeak in his sister's voice, but at home she'd go back to purring like Low-era Bowie.

After his shower, Thor put on clean pajamas and went downstairs to lie on the living room sofa and do his annual reading of Carmilla, which, for three years running, had been his own personal kick-off for Halloween. The vampire's carriage was about to overturn when Thor heard a crash somewhere upstairs and dropped his book on his face in his fright. His heart was beating so fast it was all he could hear for a moment. His hands were shaking and his stomach was quivering inside him. Few birds were big enough to go through a window. Most were stopped by the glass and tossed down with broken necks. But that never happened here, as all the windows had lattice across them, leaving six by nine inch rectangles of open glass. At most, birds would occasionally try to perch on the lattice and their breasts would bounce off the panes, leaving dusty feather-prints for Thor to study.

Thor couldn't hear any fluttering or thumping as he made his way upstairs. His heart sank. He hoped the creature had merely stunned itself and was sitting, bewildered, somewhere on a rug.

When he got to the top of the steps, Thor could see something glittering on the floor in front of his sister's room, spilling out into the hall from beneath her door. For a second he thought it was the Milky Way. Flecks of light twinkled against the deep red and blue patterns that swirled through the rug in a combination that looked exactly like stars.

“Loki?”

“The mirror,” she said. Her voice was raw. “I can't move. Can you bring me some shoes or something?”

“Yeah.”

“Use the veranda doors.”

“'Kay,” Thor said, and went to his room to put on shoes of his own.

When he let himself into her room, her back was to him. She was standing in front of her door with glass all around her. Thor could see the light rectangle of pristine paint that had been hidden behind the mirror for half of a century. The empty frame of a plastic hand-mirror was held limply in Loki's left hand. Blood was trickling down her ankles and over the tops of her feet from where shards of glass had pelted her after they shattered in the collision.

“Is there glass in your cuts?” Thor asked.

“Probably.”

He walked up behind her, feeling the mirror break down further beneath the hard leather soles of his dress shoes. The sound was like biting down on sugar granules and Thor half expected to taste something sweet. There was just enough space in front of Loki that Thor could slip between her and the door, so he did so. Her face was puffy and blotchy and her eyes were red. He took the empty frame from her hand and tossed it into the trash.

“Over my shoulder,” he said, and crouched.

She bent at the waist and draped herself over him, then he rose and crunched his way back to the veranda, toeing off his shoes and leaving them at her door so he wouldn't be tracking glass everywhere he went.

She smelled like herself after so long without a shower and still wearing the same nightgown. The silk was warm against Thor's cheek with the heat of her hip bleeding through. He wanted to turn his head ninety degrees to his right to kiss her and breathe her in through through the satin. The weight of her was unfamiliar. She was lighter and harder than he expected. The back of her right knee felt tiny where he steadied it with his left hand. The tendons seemed naked and fragile. He didn't recognize them.

She hadn't come to his room last autumn or winter. Thor had taken that to mean he shouldn't go to her room that past summer. But he'd wanted to, lying awake through every full moon and sticky night, longing for the gust of her breath against the back of his neck and the unconscious complaints she would make as her sleeping body shifted behind him.

Thor brought her through his room and then into the bathroom, where he set her on the counter next to the sink and turned her sideways so her feet were at the edge of the basin. He let the water run so that it would get warm, then ran back to his room to fetch a flashlight. After he'd rinsed all the wounds, he carefully squeezed them open and shined the light into them, searching for glass. She flinched when he touched the cut on top of her right foot. When he looked, there was a colorless sliver standing up in the center of it. It was so small he feared he'd push it farther in—or break it off and leave a piece behind—if he tried to pull it out with the tweezers. He took her by the heel and toes, used his lips to hold the wound open, and sucked the little shard into his mouth. There were ribbons of pink in his saliva when he spat the glass into the sink and rinsed it away. The salted iron taste of Loki's blood lingered on his tongue as he washed all the cuts again and patted them dry with a towel, ruining it in the process. He laid six bandages out on the counter top and set about smearing antibiotic ointment onto their pads with a cotton swab before adhering them all to his sister. Then he carried her out, propped her up in his bed, brought her the oatmeal that had been waiting for her all day in the fridge, and left to clean up her mess.

She could hear him dragging the shop-vac up the steps while she ate. She heard the clatter of the glass emptying into her little steel trash can as Thor swept up the larger pieces with a dustpan. By the time the vacuum started, she had finished her breakfast and was stretched out in bed, staring at the stars on Thor's ceiling, just visible in daylight as beige-yellow blemishes on the flat white paint. When she was young, she saw them as a link; the same sky shining over both their heads even when they were apart, the date always their birthday. But now the stars were the things Thor wanted. Things that were not Loki, and not Alfheim, and not now, but strange worlds far away—and long ago. His walls were covered in pictures of extraterrestrial places as seen by Hubble and Cassini: the sun glinting off of Titan's liquid methane sea; the icy surface of Enceladus, where the closest neighboring life-forms were most likely to be; Saturn's rings and the shadows of its moons; Uranus, lying on its belly with its wispy clouds and ring; The Crab Nebula, like a glowing coral reef; the wings on NGC 2359; and the star-nursery of the Carina Nebula, resembling nothing so much as dust kicked up under the sea. Even the nearest of these objects was a billion miles away. Thor wanted the sky with his little body of earth. Wanted to live forever—not because he didn't want to die, but because that's how long it would take to see everything. He'd nurse infant stars with eyedroppers if the universe would only let him.

But they were beyond him and he knew it, which left him with this world, of which he had seen little. Thor's thirst for new things would lure him out into the fray. It had already begun. Going to the dance was the opening of the door.

Thor wasn't one to make his own worlds the way Loki was. Thor would take what men had ruined and try to mend it in an attempt to level the field, but he wouldn't build something new. He liked to take things as they were, and there was much he hadn't yet seen as it was.

Loki preferred to filter and refine things. To translate what people had made. To experience strangers by what they had done rather than by what they were themselves. Directly, they were ugly and messy and slow. With their finished work, she didn't have to watch the years of study, sweat, stupidity and failure. Life was too short. She'd take their finished piece and improve on the improved. Bend it to her purposes and render it her own. Further reduce a distillation.

She wondered when she had ceased to be enough for Thor—and why—and then wondered whether she had ever been really been enough to begin with. Between Thor and fashion, she was happy. But she'd had more of him than he'd had of her; her secret had been sitting between them for two years now. She would still catch him staring at her with his forehead in a twist. He would fixate on her cold feet, checking her toes all the time, pressing them between his palms or sandwiching them between his thighs as he sat beside her on the sofa, pushing his warmth into her. He would do too many of their chores, leaving her with only the dishes to dry after he'd cleaned the whole house. He'd frown at her empty plate if everyone else was having seconds. He'd cover her in blankets when they watched movies on the couch if it was cold enough to have the windows closed.

Now Loki was worried about whether Thor would mend. The cuts on her legs would take a week to fully heal. She'd been hurting Thor every day for two years straight. If she stopped now, would he recover in a week, or would it take fourteen years?

After the vacuum stopped running, Loki heard Thor going up and down the stairs half a dozen times, and going outside just as many. When he came back into his room, he flopped down beside her and let out a sigh.

“Shook your rug out on the driveway and wiped down the wood with lemon oil. Didn't see anything sparkly left on the floor, but you might want to double check.”

“Thanks.”

“Legs okay?”

“Mmhmmm,” she nodded, and then started to get up, but he caught her by the shoulder.

“Keep your feet up and let everything clot a little longer.”

“Can you get me my laptop, then?”

“Sure,” Thor said, and disappeared for a minute.

He set it on her belly and then left again. When he came back, he had his book with him and he smelled spicy.

“What did you get into down there?” she asked.

“Stirred the stew Freyr left for us in the slow cooker.”

“Is it that Moroccan one with the apricots?”

“Yep.”

“Sweet.”

Thor settled in beside her and picked up where he'd left off at the carriage crash. He'd only made it a few sentences farther when Loki pulled the book out of his hands with a playful “Yoink” and plopped her laptop down in its stead.

There was only one tab open.

Thor looked over at Loki, who had Carmilla propped up on her chest and was reading the blurb on the back. Her cheeks were flushed and her breathing was tight. The book shook in her hands with each thud of her heart.

He read the article on the screen while his own pulse climbed steadily in his veins. It was Wikipedia's entry for 5-ARD. Thor was grateful for all the linked references, but the end of the piece had his limbs trembling to the point that Loki set the book down and rolled toward him, too distracted to read.

“'5-ARD is associated with an increased risk of cryptorchidism and testicular cancer.'” Thor quoted. His voice had gone high, pinched, and patchy.

“I know,” Loki said, folding the laptop shut and turning briefly to set it behind her on Thor's nightstand. “They descended, so I only have to worry about the latter.”

“Can you do self-exams?” Thor asked, curling toward her, eyes wide and watery.

“I do what I can.”

Thor's forehead folded up.

“I'm not built like you,” she said.

Thor was still frowning.

“Here,” she huffed, and pushed the blankets down past her thighs.

Thor stared at her face and she tossed her head and widened her eyes, ordering him to look elsewhere. He sat up beside her and gazed down at her stomach. Her nightgown was resting flush against her front. Thor could see where it sank into her navel. See the peaks of her hips. See the rough little mound of her pubic hair pressing up and tenting the silk. See two plump lips rounding the fabric before it sagged between her thighs.

Loki's hand snaked forward. With her first two fingers, she tapped the lips.

“Balls,” she said. “So I can't really reach the backs.”

Thor tugged the blankets up to her collarbones and settled down beside her again. He grabbed her upper arm with both hands and bent his head to rest his lips on the bare skin of her shoulder.

“You need to get checked, though,” Thor whispered, squeezing her limb, insistent, and Loki laughed softly.

“God, you're as bad as Freyr. I go for ultrasounds every three months.”

“Oh, good,” Thor breathed, sagging slightly as he let out his breath. “When?”

“When Mom and I go shopping on Saturdays. Dr. Banner meets us at the office and he does my exam and then Mom and I head to Savannah afterward.”

Thor's fingers relaxed their grip and he sighed against Loki's shoulder, then kissed it and left his lips there. His fingers were still shaking faintly.

“Might get them removed when I'm done growing,” Loki murmured. “Not sure yet.”

She watched Thor's face. His eyes were hidden by his lashes, blinking infrequently.

“Most people with my condition identify as men,” Loki said, staring at the back-lit blond whiskers Thor had missed when he shaved and wondering whether she'd done the same.

“Most people,” Thor repeated, quietly scoffing. “Most people would say females nurse young and males produce semen.”

Loki's laughter was a shot of warm air on Thor's mouth.

“Well, we fucked their shit up, didn't we?” she said.

“Mmhmmm,” Thor agreed, and his eyes nearly shut with his grin.

Loki let the warmth of his smile wash over her, relieved she hadn't lost it and relishing it as she always did. A snake in the sun.

“Is it better or worse?” she asked.

“Is what better?” Thor asked, and Loki felt his lips tapping her skin with the words.

“Knowing.”

“Better,” Thor huffed, “I had no idea. Scared the shit out of me.”

“You didn't even suspect?” Loki asked, with her eyebrows raised in disbelief.

“What's to suspect?”

“My Adam's apple. My voice. My hips. My waist. My height. My jaw. My forehead. My arms. My shoul-”

“Shhhh,” Thor laughed. “Everyone has those. You look like Rooney Mara.”

Loki smiled and kissed his forehead for that.

Thor reached to move the curl that had fallen across Loki's face, holding it up in the light, turning it and squinting at it.

“It seems more red from some angles,” Thor ventured.

“Mmm. I put indigo over henna to make it black. The indigo's already fading a little, but Freyr would wear me out if I used any of that toxic salon trash.”

“Must have taken forever.”

“All night.”

“I still can't believe he lets you wear makeup every day,” Thor admitted. “It made him itch when we painted each other's faces over the summer.”

“Oh, he's been a perfect pain in the ass about it. He reads all the labels and then confiscates most of it. A few weeks ago I made him print out a list of all the forbidden ingredients so I could get the right things in the first place.”

Thor shook his head and kept playing with Loki's hair until she closed her eyes and settled comfortably into his bed.

“I can smell myself,” she sighed, and wrinkled her nose. “I should take a shower before I stink up your sheets.”

“No shower until you've got good scabs,” Thor scolded, then climbed out of bed and tossed his deodorant into the spot he vacated. She swiped it on and tossed it back to him.

“Is it hard to shave armpits?” Thor asked.

“No,” she said. “And it's nice because there's no hairy barrier collecting chunks of deodorant and dropping them everywhere.”

Thor hummed.

Loki picked up Thor's paperback again and aimed it at him.

“I'm disappointed in you,” she sighed, though the twist of her mouth wasn't entirely displeased.

“Why's that?”

“It's awfully ordinary of you.”

“What is?” Thor asked.

“Hot girl-on-girl action,” Loki accused, arching an eyebrow and tapping one slim fingertip against first word of the title on the front of the book—Carmilla and 12 Other Classic Tales of Mystery. She knew the novella's reputation.

Thor snorted and shook his head.

“If I wanted that, I'd be on PornHub,” he said, and moved toward the door. “I'm gonna go stir the stew again. Freyr said it would be ready by five.”

“What time is it now?” she asked, too lazy to turn her head and look at his alarm clock.

“Quarter to four,” Thor answered, leaning against the door jamb and enjoying the cool kiss of its paint against his bare arm. “Need anything?”

She shook her head no, so he left to tend their supper.

Loki knew that if she set a well-loved book on its spine, it would show her its owner's favorite passages. Always something beautiful—and very often something sexual, if there was any to be had. Thor's copy of Carmilla was no exception. It was one of the few pieces of fiction he would willingly read. He slogged bitterly through his English assignments, chewing up the texts, extracting their themes, and spitting them back at his teachers as tersely as he was able. But this he read over and over. A yellowed paperback with John White Alexander's murky painting ofIsabella and the Pot of Basil on the cover. The book had looked so shabby—and Gothic Horror had seemed so silly—that Loki had passed it over in favor of reading a hundred other things. But she knew it sat there on Thor's shelf, snuggled senselessly between The Voyage of the Beagle and The Cichlid Fishes: Nature's Grand Experiment In Evolution.

As Loki moved through the story, she could see its appeal, and she found that the parts she liked best were the passages that the book had a tendency to open to on its own.

She felt both soothed and unnerved to find that some nineteenth century Irish widower had so succinctly captured her own messy thoughts. Carmilla's rhapsodies to Laura—her “wild nonsense”—perfectly illustrated the paradox of being in love. Loki felt flayed by the words—seen through to her rancid radiant marrow.

The bulk of what she'd read before had reeked of cowardice. Writers whitewashed love and rendered it empty. Peeled the hate off its back and claimed it had always been clean. But, really, it was rotten and filthy and far better for it. Here was the spinning coin instead of the plaque on the wall. The repulsion that drew your eyes back over your shoulder as you ran. The purity that begged to be brightened with corruption. The jealousy that grew out of adoration. The forgiveness born of betrayal. The wounds that couldn't be soothed until they'd been delivered. The death of self that came when you felt the most alive. The vampire was greedy, gluttonous, demanding, devoted, erotic, physical, and captivated. For all her strength, she was powerless; she could no more resist her prey than the cat could the cream. Nature was inescapable. Love was carnivorous.

And it looked as though Thor understood.

Thor's disdain for words made the book all the more remarkable. A month ago, Loki had looked something up in Thor's dictionary, not wanting to go downstairs and get her laptop from Frigga's studio, and she found that her brother had highlighted entries throughout the entire thing. The marker was still blindingly fluorescent, which meant Thor's work was recent. At first, Loki thought they were words he had looked up, but on reading them she realized they were all things he knew and could properly spell. Aardvark, abacus, and abalone were highlighted; abandon,abase, and abash were not. Abdomen, yes; aberration, no.

When she had finished with Carmilla, Loki pulled Thor's dictionary from the shelf again and flipped through it. Boxwood and boysenberry, yes;boy and boyfriend, no. Girdle, yes; girl, no. Louse and lovebird, yes; love and lover, no.

And now she was once again at a loss as to what Thor was doing with Carmilla.

The kitchen clouded up with the scents of cinnamon and almonds as Thor took the lid off the pot and scraped at the sauce that was starting to stick to the bottom of the crock. Freyr's cooking had gotten so good that even his laziest offerings would have Thor's mouth watering long before he was seated at the dinner table. His stomach had been growling for two hours now. He tided himself over with an apple and stared at the calendar that was stuck to the refrigerator door. It was easier to plot a timeline when the days were drawn out for him like this. Easier to organize his life when it was at a remove. Thor let the events of the past week slot neatly into place within the lines of the grid. His mother had already crossed all the days off, fencing in the past so it would stay out of his way.

After an hour, Thor heard his sister moving upstairs—doors shutting and floorboards creaking, threadbare rugs rubbing farther away under pale feet, the rush and thud of water starting and stopping in the pipes. When she came down, she'd brushed her curls out into waves. It made her hair look longer and thicker and the strands moved together as one fluid mass. She had on another nightgown that Thor had never seen. This one was pale green chiffon, done in a sixties style, with thin straps and a low v-neck from which sheer fabric flowed down in soft pleats. The only references the gown itself made to the body were in its length and the holes for the arms and neck, but when Loki walked, the speed of her paces sent the silk billowing out behind her, which in turn pulled it tight across her front. When she stopped, it would spin slowly around her, briefly carried forward by its momentum, before settling in a tall A-line and hiding her shape again. It was simultaneously the most and least revealing thing she had ever worn.

The red henna base tones peeking through the indigo in her hair and the complementary green of the gown brought out the peaches and pinks in her skin. Thor had missed them.

“Did you make this one?” Thor asked, eying the gown, and Loki nodded. “It's amazing.”

“Want one?” she asked, tossing her copy of Dracula on the counter with a breezy thud.

“What color should it be?” Thor asked, as he pulled fruits and vegetables out of the fridge and assembled their salads.

Loki hummed and tipped her head, weighing the options as she set the table.

“It could be white,” she said, standing back as Thor ladled the stew into bowls, not wanting to be splashed and stained. “You'd look tan next to it, and it wouldn't clash with your coloring.”

“I did like the white one you were wearing earlier,” Thor said, as they sat down.

The stew was too hot to eat, so they picked at their salads. Thor pulled the lettuce out with his fingers and buried it in his stew. He preferred to pair the bitterness of greens with more savory flavors. In salads, he always felt lettuce killed the joy of the fruits, nuts, and cheeses, so he would eat it first just to get it over with. If, however, he was unsupervised like this, he would stuff it into the main course.

“A dark grey would be something,” Loki decided. “But without pleats—the shapes would have to be softer to make up for the harder color. A loose tie at the waist. Lower neckline. Split sleeves—at the elbow or shorter.”

Thor nodded, staring ahead with his eyes unfocused, picturing the thing.

Loki watched him. The word nightgown would be highlighted in Thor's version of English.

“Is that your religion in your dictionary?” Loki asked.

“How do you mean?"

“Are the marked entries the only things you believe in?”

“No,” Thor said, shaking his head. “They're the things I can pin down because they can't really be anything else.”

“So you do believe in boys and girls and love?”

“Not exactly.”

Loki stared at him. Thor was spearing apricots with his fork and eating them slowly. His left elbow was on the table and he was propping up his head with the heel of his palm against his temple.

“Thor,” Loki chided. Lately it was like pulling teeth when she asked for his uncertainties.

“I don't know,” he sighed, stabbing olives now, and looking five years older with his frown. “Boying and girling, maybe. Love... It's not that I don't believe in it or don't feel it. It's just that I don't think it counts unless it's an action. So many words are just thoughts, and thoughts are just...”

“Are just what?"

“Are just a kind of nothing,” Thor shrugged. “Like memories. Like the past. They can't touch anyone unless they're acted upon. It's like if you fell in love with someone but never interacted with them. From their side, it would be the same as you not loving them at all.”

“Sex?” Loki asked.

“As an action, not an attribute,” Thor said.

“Is the action highlighted?”

“No. The definition is too narrow, and it's all so subjective and relative anyway.”

“Sewing machine better be highlighted,” Loki said.

“It is.”

When they'd finished with dinner, Thor washed the dishes while Loki dried them and put them away. If she finished her half of the task before he had another dish ready for her, she whipped him with the towel while she waited. They hadn't turned any lights on, and the house was rosy with the sunset coming in through the west windows. Their eyes turned dusty violets and bright ambers as the rays went through them. They gripped each other's chins with sudsy fingertips to tilt their heads to the angles that would best catch the light, admiring sharp bones, smooth skin, and glowing irises.

When they were done, Loki grabbed her book from the counter top.

“Will you read it to me?”

Thor smiled and nodded.

This was how she got her fill of words from him; when he didn't have to weigh them himself, he didn't mind speaking them.

The house was getting hazy with just the lavender dusk coming in through the windows. Loki followed Thor into the living room where she took her favorite spot at the end of the sofa, leaning up against its arm with her legs straight out in front of her. But Thor set the book down in his customary spot at the opposite end, then folded Loki's legs up toward her chest and sat down in the center of the sofa without turning on the lamps.

“Isn't it too dark to read?” Loki asked.

“Probably.”

Thor laid Loki's feet in his lap and pressed her toes between his hands like he had a hundred times before.

“I'm not sick,” she reminded him.

“I know. But your feet are still cold.”

He flexed his hands around the end of her left foot, stretching her toes back slightly, and then lifted them up to his lips. He opened the edge of his left hand and blew a slow hot breath into his cupped palms, wrapping her toes in steamy warmth. She could feel the hem of her nightgown hanging open below her raised leg, leaving a gap as wide as her ankle and letting cool air come in under her skirt.

When Loki's left foot was warm against Thor's fingers, he sandwiched the toes between his crossed legs and did her right. Afterward, he sat holding her left ankle in his left hand and cupping her heel in his right, rubbing it in slow circles and then following it up to her calf. He'd done this before, too, but always with her legs straight out ahead of her, far from her body. Being bent into an S curve meant that Loki's heels were near the undersides of her thighs. She could feel the heat from Thor's skin radiating out against them, and it occurred to her that Thor was reaching up her skirt. Normally, her hems were at her knees and Thor never got near them, but with a floor-length gown, to touch any part of her legs required that he put his hands under her clothes. When he went to rub her right calf, his forearm dragged against the back of her left leg. The hundreds of little gold hairs on his skin brushed the smooth expanse of her thigh with a rustling sound she could feel more than hear.

Loki began to breathe through her mouth so that the speed of her breathing wouldn't make the air whistle through her nose. She could feel Thor's warmth spreading through her, borne on her blood. It gathered in the low places, obeying gravity, seeming to pool in her behind before it flowed up between her legs and bled steadily into her belly and thighs. A stimulant and a depressant; her pulse was at a gallop and her lungs were trotting after, but she felt leaden and stupid. Thought had faded from her head as her mind extended its attention to the backs of her thighs and the swelling flesh between them. She couldn't remember the particulars of the room she was sitting in. The world had gone blank beyond their bodies.

“I'm sorry,” Thor said, and dipped his head to kiss her left knee. “I thought you knew it was nothing. I wouldn't have gone if I'd known it would hurt you.”

His hand was making soothing passes over her calf, kneading and shifting it gently. Then he ran it up to the bend of her knee and let it coast along the underside of her thigh, arching his fingers backward as far as he could, touching her with his nails, knuckles, and tendons. As his hand descended, it slid higher up her leg. The bony knob in his wrist dragged along the inside of her thigh, shifting the muscle and making a dry whispering sound. Ulnar styloid process. The words disappointed her. But Thor's words were coming smoothly, which meant he was sure of them.

“She thinks I'm some kind of idiot for not wanting to go to college,” Thor said.

“So she got the right answer for the wrong reason,” Loki teased, weakly.

“Some kind of idiot,” Thor said, and she could hear his smile.

“One of a kind.”

Thor twisted his wrist and pinched the back of her leg so tightly she squealed. She dug her heels into the top of his right thigh until he yelped and called a truce. Then he gave her calf a pat and released her toes from his clamped thighs.

The air felt cold against Loki's feet when Thor got up to turn on the lights. He took a blanket off the back of an armchair and tucked it around her, then sat down at the end of the couch and read Dracula's Guest.

“I love that Harker is the damsel in distress,” Loki said, afterward, sated and smiling.

“And that even Dracula has to come to his rescue,” Thor added, laughing, and they sat, flapping their toes and breathing slowly beneath the warm glow of the lamps.

“It's Carmilla in the tomb,” Loki murmured,

“It is,” Thor agreed. “Did you like it?”

“There really isn't anything new under the sun, is there?”

“No, there isn't. So you did like it.”

“Yes.”

Frigga and Freyr didn't get home until after ten. They were tired and happy, with a dozen bags of shopping under their arms and their bellies full of rich food. The twins were still settled on the sofa, steadily devouring Dracula proper.

“No chocolate unless you help us with all this stuff,” Frigga called, swinging her arms slightly to make the bags rustle. Thor and Loki tossed away their blankets and stretched their stiff limbs as they scurried to the door.

“Oh, honey that turned out great,” Frigga said, seeing Loki in the nightgown. “Look at the way it moves.”

She had seen Loki working on it for weeks, but had not yet seen her in it.

“Thanks,” Loki said, blushing a bit at the praise and taking half a dozen bags from where they were looped over her mother's forearms, cutting purple lines into her freckled skin.

Thor did the same for Freyr and they all went to the living room to sort everything, setting the chocolates aside on the coffee table and then picking through pashminas, fall sweaters, blankets, books, and sewing notions.

Loki saw something strange on Freyr's face. Not worry, precisely, but some sort of concern. Not sad, but not smiling. She assumed it was related to the breasts she wasn't wearing.

“I told him about my testicles today,” Loki said, casually—almost singsong.

Freyr nodded slowly while Frigga shook her head and tried not to laugh.

Thor caught his mother's eye and they shot quick smiles at each other.

“So,” Freyr, said, hoping for a bit more out of her.

“So,” Loki continued, “he's just like you. The only thing that tripped him up was the cancer risk.”

Freyr nodded again and sank down into his chair while the twins descended on their chocolates. There were Café Americano and Habanero Caramel truffles for Thor, Raspberry Chambord and Georgia Peach Cream truffles for Loki, a dozen Milk Chocolate Peanut butter cups for them to share, and an assortment of other dainties for them to sample. The twins were always divided between the urge to eat everything at once and the wish to hide it and hoard it and try to drag it out for all of October. They split a peanut butter cup and moaned, loving the push and pull of sugar and salt and the faintly grainy texture of the home-made peanut butter. There was a hint of honey in it that lent it warmth and tartness. Then they split a second one and promised they would stop there, at least until morning.

To distract themselves from sweets, they asked for explicit details on what savory wonders their parents had eaten for supper.

Once they were satisfied, Frigga sent the twins up to bed with the things that were theirs—sweaters and pashminas—and then put her own purchases away. When she was finished, Freyr was still sitting in the same position in his chair in the living room, staring somewhat blankly ahead with his knees wide and his stocking feet clasped together at odd angles.

“What's wrong?” she said, sitting on the arm of his chair. It took a second for him to catch her question.

“Hmm? Oh, nothing's wrong. I always knew he'd take it well. I didn't realize she still hadn't told him. Figured she spilled her guts that first week. She held out two years. Thor, too, I guess.”

“She's stubborn,” Frigga murmured.

“Well, we know where she gets that,” Freyr said, nudging her so that she wobbled on the arm of the chair. She steadied herself, smacked the back of his head, and raked her fingers through his hair the wrong way to make a mess of it.

“So what is it, then?” she asked.

“They're just getting so big,” he sighed, dragging his hands over his face, but leaving his hair in disarray. “I remember when it was me reading to them.”

“Feeling like a fifth wheel, are we?” she teased, and he nodded. “I felt a little betrayed when they started eating solid foods and they actually liked it,” she admitted. Freyr hummed.

“They're taller than you now,” he said. “Had you noticed?”

“Yes,” she groaned, running her fingers though her own hair and tugging it lightly to stretch her scalp. “I told them maybe I'd forgive them for it some day.”

Freyr laughed.

“Laugh while you can,” she advised. “They're going to be taller than you, too.”

  


6 mating

 

Loki stood at the bathroom sink, brushing her teeth and thinking of Thor. Thor, whose favorite sound was thunder—not a voice or a language or an instrument, but the bright crack of energy. Who dismissed English and opted to speak through mediums of milk and blood. Who saidDon't die today, and carried orphans up to his room. Who said Drink this—I put some sugar in it, and slipped eyedroppers past parched lips. Who said Don't hurt, and sucked broken glass from your skin. Who said Have my flesh and breath—they'll keep you warm and incubated you. Who said I'm sorry with his hands under your skirt.

She had put a blade in his side and an ache in his testicles. There were a thousand things the gestures said, but mostly I hate you. I hate her. Don't love her. I love you.

Loki spat the diluted foam of the toothpaste into the basin, rinsed her mouth, and reminded herself that, in the hours since she had stabbed him, Thor had put his lips on her feet.

She endured the burning mint of mouthwash for a minute and a half longer than she needed to, worried about supper's onions lingering on her tongue, then wondered if it was all being secreted by her glands and pores at this point anyway after running through her guts.

She went to her room and brushed her hair. She hoped her nightgown hadn't wrinkled too much in the back, but had no full length mirror now in which to make certain. She shut off the lights and stood still, holding her breath as she locked her door, then pressed her ear to the cold wood and listened. Frigga and Freyr had not yet gone to bed. Their voices were a low murmur punctuated by soft laughter, but their conversation was unintelligible, having bounced off of too many steps and walls before it reached her.

Loki was certain they wouldn't be peeking in on her when they came upstairs. They hadn't done so in at least six years. And now she was using her dilators every night, and they knew it, so she was doubly safe from any intrusions. Still, her gait was careful. She skipped the boards that creaked and landed each step with her weight evenly distributed across the ball of her foot and her toes, gently lowering her heel afterward. She slipped out onto the veranda and turned to look at her room. There was a slim gap between the curtains hanging in her east window. She went back inside to rearrange them so that they remained shut, then brushed her hair again.

She had never felt nervous sneaking into Thor's room before, and she had never had reason to. She told herself she had no reason now. Nothing had changed. This was merely a progression. An accumulation. The dolly out of a close-up that revealed the complete picture. She told her heart to stop embarrassing itself with its melodramatic beating, but it wouldn't mind her.

Thor had nothing beautiful to sleep in. He considered sleeping in nothing, but it seemed presumptuous and possibly aggressive. He tried on his summer pajamas—thin white cotton bottoms and a grey tank—but they smelled a bit stale after a month in his dresser and the pants had gotten short on him, so he shucked them off again. He sniffed himself and freshened his deodorant slightly, hoping his touch had been light enough that the scent wouldn't be too obvious. He didn't know why he was worried. After hot summer nights they would both wake up stinking and she never teased him about it.

Having no better options, Thor finally settled for feeling dowdy in a faded navy t-shirt and grey flannel bottoms. He curled up on his side in the center of his bed facing the window, waiting to see whether Loki would walk past and turn into his door.

When she appeared, she was brushing her hands over her face and pulling things from her eyelashes. Spider silk, he realized. There were webs between half of the bars that held up the railings around the veranda. The rose bushes were full of them, too. The eaves on the east side of the house sparkled with the efforts of orb-weavers when the sun hit them in the morning, and stray strands of silk fluttered everywhere in the breeze, looking like streamers leftover from pixie revelry.

Loki let herself in, locked the doors behind her, and drew the curtains across the windows. The fabric was sheer, but as long as the lights were off in the bedroom, she and Thor would be able to see out, but no one could see in.

“Is your other door locked?” she whispered.

“No. It'll be fine.”

She ignored him and tiptoed across his room to lock the door.

He scooted back and patted the dent he'd left in the mattress in front of him until she rolled into it. He tugged the blankets over her to wrap her in the pool of warmth he'd made.

“You look like one of our fairies,” Thor whispered.

Loki felt the words puffing out against her knuckles and heard the smile in his voice.

“Is that why you looked at me funny the first time you saw my hair like this?”

“In part.”

“I did it so we wouldn't look alike,” she said.

“I know.”

“Now I'm stuck with it. The indigo might fade but the henna will be there until it grows out.”

“You'll look like Grace Coddington, but with better bone structure.”

“My hairline isn't that high,” Loki huffed.

“I'm not even sure hers is,” Thor said.

Loki tried to see Thor's colors in the dark, but they'd all gone grey like her own. At the foot of the bed, his toes wrapped around hers, testing them. She hadn't noticed she was cold until she was pressed against his warmth.

“Your feet are freezing,” he sighed. “Want socks?”

She shook her head no. She would not send him from the bed.

“Do you even own a pair of socks anymore?”

“Just stockings,” she admitted.

He hooked her behind the knee with his heel and dragged her leg between his own.

They heard chiffon rustling against the nap of flannel and felt the heat of stacked limbs. Thor rolled his hips forward like a sidewinder until they were flush with Loki's, then leaned in and tipped her slightly onto her back.

He was half hovering over her, propped up on his elbow. He looked pale beside his shirt and small beneath the starred ceiling. Strands of his hair brushed the bare skin of her shoulder with ends that were over two years old. The twelve year old Thor was touching her. The one whose sister hadn't sprouted any testicles yet. But the Thor who knew about all that was touching her, too, tucking her hair behind her ear and tracing her jaw. Running his fingers under the strap of her nightgown as he mapped the curve of her collarbone. Following her arm down to the wrist and raising her hand to his lips.

Her hand was smooth and cold when he kissed it, but when he pressed the pads of his fingers into the crepey skin on the inside of her elbow, her flesh was warm above her thudding veins. He stroked the pulse point, raising goosebumps on her skin and making her breath come faster.

When Thor bent to kiss her forehead, Loki saw herself as a poisoned prince, saved from the doom of living-death by her tiny true love's kiss. Thor's hair tickled the edges of her jaw as he tilted his head to press his lips to each of her cheeks. The bed bounced as he moved down toward her feet, pushing the blankets aside and lifting the hem of her nightgown until he could kiss her knees. When Loki opened her eyes she could see the sun through the leaves on the peach trees and the white sky pouring between the boughs in beams of light that shifted with the breeze.

Thor kissed her on the tip of the nose next, exactly as she expected. Then he pressed himself to her side, still half hovering above her, but closer than before. His hand had curled around her shoulder, gently urging her up. She slipped her arm around his waist so that she could pull herself in to meet him. The first dry kiss he set to her lips left her smiling, just as it had eight years ago. The second one left her lips wet where his had clasped them in a soft nip. She felt his cock press an echoed kiss to her hip through their pajamas. If they had been naked, it would have been wet, too, and Loki regretted that they hadn't undressed.

By the third kiss, she couldn't resist returning them. Thor made a tiny helpless sound when she sucked his lower lip into her mouth. They could briefly feel the tug of the thread of saliva that stretched between them before they smeared it away with another kiss. Loki lost count after that. There were pauses and moans and changes of position, but their mouths never entirely seemed to separate.

Eight years ago, she lasted ten kisses and then tackled him. Now she counted the thrusts of her tongue into the welcoming suck of his mouth. When she got to six, she threw her weight forward and knocked him onto his back, then sat up, straddling his hips, and reached for the hem of his t-shirt. The thin skin of his stomach fold into tidy lines that meshed with the muscles of his abdomen as he curled up off the mattress to strip off his top. No baby fat now. Nothing extraneous about his body. Nothing to protect him.

Loki tugged the shirt from the ends of his arms and folded it neatly before laying it over the bed frame. Being the same size made the twins feel grown when they were alone together, but Loki's hands knew the span of Freyr's shirts from when she folded the laundry, and they were nearly twice this size. The twins were tall for fourteen—“We'll be fifteen in two months”—but they were as narrow as Jane. Loki had forgotten that they were something fragile—that Thor could be counted among the delicate things, like gossamer, fledglings, and dandelion fluff.

She seated herself carefully on his hips and felt his cock rise up to meet her as she sank, then felt it twitch as it was pinned beneath her. She was centered over his testicles, incubating them. The head of her clitoris came more than a third of the way up the shaft of his cock and pressed against the ridge in a way that they both liked, relaying every twitch through a thin layer of flannel. Thor had his right hand splayed over his sternum and his left resting over his solar plexus. There was mute theatrical gratitude in it, but grace more than anything. She took up his hands and kissed their palms, then set them under her nightgown, high on her thighs.

“Are the cuts on your ankles okay like this?” he whispered.

She wanted the room to flood with volcanic ash and make a mold of their bodies. Wanted some fool to fill it with plaster a thousand years later and then fail to recognize them in the cast, assuming they were something as simple as a couple of kids fucking.

“Yes,” she said, and pulled her nightgown over her head, then sailed it down to drape over the brass bars at the foot of the bed.

Her hair tickled her shoulders as she moved. It held the heat of her flesh against itself so that her neck began to sweat. The soft black waves fell down around her face to act as blinders, blocking her view of the room around her, leaving only the narrow strip of her twin.

She drew Thor's slim body with skating touches of her fingertips, feeling the way the skin stretched smooth and tight over his shoulders where his bones were beginning to broaden. He laughed softly when she traced his nipples, and his fingers tightened on her thighs. His breath stopped when she ran her palms down his stomach and followed his waistband with her thumbnails.

She swung her left leg over his hip and knelt beside him, then reached for the drawstring, pausing once she had the ends of it between her fingertips.

“Yes,” Thor gasped, and she undid the bow as he raised his hips.

She pulled the elastic up over his cock and tugged his pants down past his knees. He folded his legs up to help her reach and then flapped his feet to kick the clothes away.

Loki could feel the heat of his breath panting out of his lungs. The sweaty musk of him was floating up from between his thighs, comforting her with how much it resembled her own scent. She sat on his belly this time, backing up until his prick was nestled snugly in the cleft of her ass.

Not since the days of shared baths and stories in the orchard had they given each other this much of their skin. Over eight years lost to cotton and silk. Had the thought occurred to Loki under other circumstances, she would have wept at the waste.

She could feel his hips moving behind her and the hot line of his cock shifting under his foreskin, sliding between her cheeks. She ground her clit against his belly the way she used to do with her pillows and braced her hands on his shoulders, driving him down into the softness of the bed. Thor didn't have to move his hips anymore; the way she curled her pelvis inward was dragging her ass down his cock while it slid her clit up his stomach.

He was desperate to see her. He read her shapes with his hands, measuring her waist, ribs, and neck before palming the planes of her breasts. When he rubbed her nipples in tiny circles with the pads of his thumbs, her come pulsed out onto his stomach. She gave no voice to her cries, but her breath seemed to echo in her open mouth before it gusted past her lips. The sound tickled Thor's ribs, and the heat that had been compressing in the head of his cock boiled over and rushed up into his belly. His muscles flexed with the current flashing through his nerves and he arched against her. She sighed a soft “Oh” when the base of her back got wet.

It hadn't been enough. They were still in one piece, which left them in two pieces. Loki's blood raced stubbornly within its own veins and Thor's bones held their ground beneath his skin. Rationally, they had known the attempt was doomed to fail, but theory was wanting next to proof. Now they could say for certain that nothing would ever be enough; never being satisfied, they would never stop seeking each other.

Loki's relief made her elbows buckle and she dropped onto Thor, who stroked her sides with soft passes of his hands, then looped his arms around her waist. She felt their hearts pounding together while the cotton of his pillowcase cooled her cheek. The scuff of her hair against the fabric was loud in her ear as she leaned in to press a kiss to Thor's temple and then licked his salt from her lips. Her semen was sticky between them, spreading and remaining wet as it mingled with their sweat. Thor's come was making soothing spots of chill along her spine, getting tacky at the edges, but still faintly reflecting the stars on the ceiling.

She wasn't certain how long she'd been asleep when Thor woke her, rubbing her back and whispering her name.

“Loki?”

“Mmm?”

“You're starting to get cold and I can't reach the blankets.”

She peeled herself off of him and flopped over onto her side. Thor tugged the sheets up and tucked them in behind her before bellying up to her again. They settled into a comfortable tangle and were almost asleep when they heard footsteps on the stairs. Loki stiffened and held her breath, then craned her neck to look at Thor's alarm clock. Nearly two. She listened to the creaky floorboards in the hallway. Heard the bathroom door across the hall opening and closing. The pipes whistling and shuddering. The two bedroom doors shutting.

Thor stroked Loki's spine until he heard her breathing even out, then rubbed her waist.

“I should go,” Loki whispered, and leaned forward to kiss Thor's cheek.

Thor splayed his fingers at the small of her back and pressed inward, keeping her in place.

“Stay with me.”

“I have to leave before they get up. He could see me on the veranda from the barn in the morning or she might hear my footsteps from her studio.”

“They'll sleep in tomorrow after shopping all day and staying up so late,” Thor murmured. He scratched between her shoulder blades and nuzzled her. Kissed her until she kissed him back. “Stay,” he whispered, and he felt the tip of her nose brush against his own as she nodded.

She rolled to face the window so that the sunrise would wake her. Thor scooted forward until they were nestled, then pillowed her neck with his arm, put his hand on her hip, and fell asleep with his face in her hair. Loki fell asleep trying to convince the skin above her coccyx to memorize the curves of Thor's penis, which was crushed against it.

When Loki woke, the sky was just rounding the corner from indigo to violet. She watched the dregs of her dreams play out in front of her, overlaid on the sideways sight of Thor's bedroom, until too much pink bled in and chased them away. Thor's slow breaths were filtering through her curls to settle damply on her neck. She didn't need mirrors to tell her that the hair at her nape would be coiled into tight spirals.

Thor had gone hard again in his sleep. So had Loki. Morning erections always made her think of the sea chasing the moon. It was a comfort: if even the oceans were enthralled, why shouldn't she be?

Thor opened his eyes when Loki turned around, but he wasn't quite conscious yet, and he shut them again for a few minutes before he made another attempt. The second time, it stuck. His hair was full, messy, and wavy after a night of sweat and skin. The wrinkles in the pillowcase had left marks on his cheek that looked like scars in the dim light. His face was puffy. It made his eyes look smaller. It also made his lips bigger. They were stretched tight and shining from where he had licked them to catch the spit that had begun to slip out the corner of his mouth. She saw his eyes taking her in. She had the advantage of being back-lit until he rolled forward and climbed on top of her, but then his hair fell down around their faces and left them both in darkness. She felt his balls drag against her own. The seam of his scrotum straddled her clit while his prick was pinned between the bottoms of their bellies.

Soon, they were sweating again. It was trickling through the joints of Loki's thighs and down around the undersides her buttocks. Some of it was hers, and some his. He kissed her face, wetting every feature with touches so light they tickled. It made her squirm beneath him and his cock flexed against her belly, but he didn't roll his hips. He kissed her mouth, then licked it, then hummed when it got her her buck and open her lips. Their breath was sickly sweet to their noses, but it tasted like nothing to their tongues, and they soon grew accustomed to the scent.

The room went bright orange at half past seven and the sunlight filtered through Thor's hair to stripe the sides of their faces. Thor pushed firm kisses onto the apples of Loki's cheeks, then tossed the blankets to the foot of the bed and crawled down toward her legs.

She felt like an oyster prised open, lying naked on her back with sun on her skin. Her shoulders were as broad as Thor's. She was a straight line from her armpits to her ankles, and had long feet and knobby knees. There was nothing soft or fleshy about her belly or her thighs. Her clitoris was standing as tall as it could, though the hood held it down a bit and her testicles crowded it, flanking it at the base and making it seem shorter next to their fullness. Still, it was over three inches long and stood up at a forty-five degree angle to her legs, pointing straight at the side of Thor's face. The head was smooth and flushed and the size of a sweet cherry. Unmistakably a cock. Loki wondered when Thor would notice he had neither a sister nor a brother—or both a sister and a brother. Loki could never decide; that coin was forever spinning in her mind. Then she wondered whether those words were welcome in Thor's dictionary.

Thor was hunched over Loki's shins, picking at something. She felt her skin stretch as he pulled the bandages off her ankles.

“They look good,” Thor whispered, then bent to kiss a spot that was free from cuts before climbing out of bed to throw the band-aids away. When he came back, he pulled the blankets up to their chins and burrowed into the bed, snuggling up against her side and wrapping his arm around her waist.

“Is sister in your English?” she whispered.

“What?”

“Is sister highlighted in the dictionary?”

“No.”

“Brother?”

“No.”

“Mother and father?” Loki tried.

“No.”

“Then what is?”

“Just twin. Everything else can shift.”

She listened to him breathing while she watched the stars at the corners of the room blend into the ceiling, then rolled away and got up. Thor pulled on his bottoms and then helped her get into her nightgown again, lifting her hair out from where it got caught under the fabric.

The sun on the veranda blinded them, pouring straight into their eyes from the east and leaving its black ghost floating at the centers of their vision. They felt like opals. Their pale skin was painted orange on their right sides, just like the whitewashed boards of the house behind them, but the lavender light of the sky above showed in their shadows.

The air was cold enough to let them see their breaths: calm, lingering wisps of silver that blew back to kiss their cheeks. The spiders' careful webs were white and motionless, sparkling with frost, stark from every angle where before they were often invisible. The twins could have flicked them with their fingers and shattered them, but Thor wasn't cruel, and Loki had too much respect for weavers.

Thor followed Loki into her room and lightly tickled her waist, then tugged her back against his chest, resting his chin on her shoulder.

“What'll you do now?” she whispered.

“Barn, shower, and breakfast.”

“And you'll read to me again after?”

“If your lazy ass is awake,” he answered, then kissed her neck through her hair and pinched her butt to say goodbye.

A minute later she could hear the hollow drag of his dresser drawers sliding open on their worn wooden tracks. His door opened out in the hall not long after. She settled into her bed and resigned herself to a thirty minute session with her dilators, having missed the fifteen minutes she should have done the night before.

Afterward, she stood before the bathroom sink, staring into the mirror while she waited for the the hot water to reach the shower. She'd felt quite beautiful in Thor's bed. Mirrors made it difficult, showing her where her memory had lagged. The cold light from the bulbs above cast strong shadows on her. She could see the way testosterone was shaping her. The same way it was shaping Thor: handsomely. She saw the hard jut of her brow above her eyes instead of the smooth dome she still expected. She saw the angle of her jaw sharpening her face where before it had been dominated by rounded forms. She saw the broad shoulders above the flat chest. The muscles swelling despite disuse. If the mirror had been lower, it would have shown her the egg-shapes of her testicles stretching the pebbled skin of her labia. As it was, she had to dip her chin.

Guevedoce.

She didn't mind the word. A description. It left things open. She wondered if Thor would highlight it, then wondered which words he was willing to attach to himself—if any. Man, woman, he, and she, were out. Male and female, too. Anything that positioned itself in relation to those words would be out. He'd rejected sex as a category, so there could be no in-betweens with it. What did that leave them?

Twin, she remembered. A thing that's one and two. Fixed and inescapable.

Freyr still hadn't come down when Thor got back from the barn. It had happened more often on weekends over the last year. Thor was strong enough to lift everything he needed on his own now, and he liked putting his new muscles to use. Freyr enjoyed sleeping in after getting up at five in the morning every day of the week.

Loki was in the kitchen, baking eggs and chopping fruit. She had her breasts on under a fitted grey chambray shirt and wore a full marigold skirt with eyelets at its scalloped edge. Normally, she went bare-legged at home, but today she had on grey stockings to hide the cuts on her shins. She favored dark tops and light bottoms to give the illusion of narrow ribs and wide hips. She wore her hair down because the way it hung in front of her collarbones helped to break the line of her shoulders and introduced slimming verticals to the broadest part of her body. Thor knew enough to see the trick, but it was no less effective and she was no less lovely.

“They awake?” he asked, joining her at the counter and kissing her cheek. The tip of his nose was cold against her skin and his lips were chapped. He smelled like horses and sleepy human.

“Haven't even heard water running yet,” she said, shaking her head.

Thor hummed and pulled her hair up off of the back of her neck so that he could kiss her nape, fitting his mouth to the line of bones. Her skin tasted bitter from shampoo. Her hair was still wet, darkening her shirt with water all around the collar. Her curls would be tight and shiny that day, having been left to their own devices. Thor looked forward to playing with them later.

The twins lingered in the kitchen, sneaking kisses, until they heard the floor boards creak upstairs.

By four in the afternoon, it was warm out, and Freyr asked if anyone wanted to go riding. Thor nodded, having gone hoarse from reading aloud for six hours.

“Sure,” Loki said, and turned to her brother. “May I borrow some jeans?”

Thor nodded again.

“I'll meet you in the barn,” Freyr said, and went out to call the horses in from the pasture.

Thor and Loki took the stairs three at a time and then Loki stole kisses and clothes from her brother, ending up in his jeans, sweater, socks, shoes, arms, and mouth.

Saddles and bridles were referred to as cheating in their household. If you didn't want to get teased, you rode bareback with touch. Loki was out of practice but the horses were in the habit of moving as a unit, so she kept to the back and let her mount pick up her slack. Thor and Freyr spent the whole ride beaming, glad at having Loki with them for the first time in over two years.

Freyr had to turn in early on Sunday nights, but Frigga stayed up late, working. Thor waited up in bed, reading on his laptop, until well after midnight before he heard his mother's door close.

When Loki hadn't shown up ten minutes later, Thor went to her room.

He saw her head turn toward him when he slipped in from the veranda, but she didn't move. She was beneath the blankets with her knees raised.

He climbed into her bed and curled up at her left shoulder so they could whisper to each other.

“Just five more minutes,” she said.

“Of what?” he whispered. She didn't appear to be doing anything.

“Dilator therapy.”

Thor said nothing for a moment, leaving Loki with only the mint puffs of his breath on her face.

“Vaginal?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it safe?” Thor breathed.

“Dr. Banner is the one who taught me how to do it.”

Thor went quiet again as a wave of guilt dampened his armpits. Loki's body was unknown to him in ways that made him feel negligent.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“No, there's just pressure. It's actually my wrist that gets sore. I do fifteen minutes every night before bed.”

“'Kay. Want me to leave you alone, then?”

“You don't have to,” she said, softly, switching hands so she could wrap her arm around him. “I already had two-thirds of a vagina, so it hasn't been too hard; some people have to start from scratch. Mine just won't elongate on its own the way a real vag—”

“You have a real vagina,” Thor cut in. “You mean an average vagina. Or typical.”

“The way a middling vagina would,” Loki continued, and Thor stifled his laughter against her skin. “So I had to get it that far with the dilators. I'm mostly doing maintenance, now. I'll be damned if I'm going to lose any ground. Getting here was like watching a fucking pot boil.”

Thor nodded and kissed her shoulder.

They did little but breathe for the remainder of their waiting. Loki would have thought Thor had fallen asleep if not for the faint wet tap his eyelids made when he blinked. Softer than a moth alighting on a window screen. It would have been lost in the noise of a city. She wondered if there was any language in which the sound had its own name, and whether Thor would be willing to allow the word into his austere English.

The short cotton robe Loki wore when she went to the bathroom left most of her legs bare, and Loki's legs were happy things, so Thor loved the robe. Her limbs were long and slim and had bounce in them even when she was sleepy, so she seemed to dance herself through the days.

When Thor had his sister on her side in his bed, he curled up in front of her legs and hugged them tight while he kissed the fronts of her thighs. She bent slightly at the waist so that she could play with his hair and smile at the top of his head. It amused her that his pose of supplication served to grant him what he wanted.

“Roll onto your back,” he said.

When she had done so, he spread her legs and knelt between them.

She waited for questing fingers and cautious exploration. Instead, she got firm kneading strokes to her thighs, buttocks, and the joints of her hips, all of which were achy after horseback riding.

“Was I limping?” Loki laughed, softly.

“No. But I went a month without riding last winter and I felt like a wishbone when I started up again.”

She hummed and pulled her knees up so that he could reach her backside a bit better.

“You should ride with a pillow underneath you to save the horses from your bony butt.”

“To save my bony butt from the horses, you mean.”

After that, Thor stretched out on the bed, rolled his sister on top of himself, and rubbed her back and bottom while she worried into his ear.

“I thought school was bad before, but it'll be even worse now,” Loki murmured. “And we hardly ever have the house to ourselves.” Thor nodded against her cheek. “What should we do? Take naps after our homework so we can stay up all night?”

“Mmm. And we could do homework during lunch.” Thor offered.

“What if I started helping you in the barn on weekends? Freyr could sleep in. We could see each other then.”

“I think he'd start getting up early,” Thor said, shaking his head. “He misses you. You could still do it, though. He'd love it.”

She hummed and then grunted softly as Thor stretched the muscles in her shoulders. When they'd gone loose, he rubbed them in circles with slowly fading pressure until he was barely brushing her body, filling their ears with the whisper of it.

She was slumped against him, surrendered to gravity. Some boneless thing from the sea, rising and falling with his breaths and rolling on the round parts of him. It was the same pleasure they'd had as children in the bath. The smooth press of someone's skin from top to toe. An open face just inches from your own. Warmth and safety. The murmur of breathing. The world made small. The wet drip of the faucet had been exchanged for the dry rustle of sheets, but it felt no less like a restoration. All the pieces were finally back in one place.

Loki had long felt like a vessel, holding what Thor was. Collecting him. Doubling him. Filling herself up with the blue of his eyes and the honey of his skin. His inviting warmth and his vast silence. His cultivated simplicity. So she had been full, but empty, because all her self had fled. She hadn't noticed that Thor had been assembling her as well. He was quiet, so it was hard to catch him at things. His looking was easily misconstrued as mere concern. But, really, it was want and thirst and greed and worship, and he had snatched up every morsel of her. He took the blond curls and the black. The daydreams and the rage. The wraith and the fay.

Monday morning found them sitting on the bus with their bags in a heap on the seat between them. They both grimaced as their bodies went through the motions their muscles knew by rote, keeping a respectable amount of space between them and hauling them off to school. Here were more hours that would be wasted.

“Do you remember Morse?” Thor asked, quietly, as they walked through the doors.

Loki smiled and blinked a Y.

Thor's grin was wicked.

If nothing else, school gave Thor a new appreciation for Loki's cleverness. For the layers of her experience. For her keen eye and subtlety. Her precision. Everyone was performing, but very few of them were aware of the extent of it. Loki knew every inch. She wore breasts that were large enough to assert themselves through her clothes, but small enough that no one would ever suspect they were anything but flesh. She had trained her voice to its current height and softness and rode its upper registers in the classroom. She spoke with long graceful sentences even when Thor knew she wanted to set everyone on fire and tell them they were nothing. She wore clothes she'd designed to broadcast exactly what she wanted to convey—full hips, a nipped waist, and narrow shoulders. She sported two-tone patent flats that added no height and broke up the long lines of her feet, making them seem smaller. Her motions were fluid. Her posture was perfect. Her hands were often folded. It was a flawless interpretation of the constructs of female and woman, performed seven hours a day, five days a week, and the way it aligned with everyone's expectations granted Loki invisibility.

Thor looked down at himself. Chest out. Arms dangling. Leaning back in his chair. Sitting with his knees a foot apart.

Drag, Thor thought, smiling. We're all in drag.

At the end of science class, Loki couldn't entirely keep her head from turning when Jane asked Thor what he was doing after school that day. She caught herself after the first quarter-turn, but her hair swayed with the motion, swishing across the top of Thor's desk and knocking his pencil to the floor.

“I have a lot of reading to do,” Thor said, for they were not yet to the middle of Dracula.

“Is it urgent?” Jane asked. “I was thinking we could launch a rocket.”

“Can't put it off,” Thor said, frowning an apology. “You should ask Sif, though. She makes her own fireworks and sets them off all the time. It's pretty much a miracle she still has all her fingers. You two should collaborate. It'd be like the Fourth of July.”

Jane looked at Sif, who was, at that moment, hiding her phone under her desk and reading a text from Loki.

The way Sif looked at Jane for the rest of the day was predatory, and Thor felt a hum of anticipation in his belly on Jane's behalf.

Sif made her move on the bus ride home while Thor and Loki eavesdropped from the seat in front of her. Loki sat with her eyebrows raised. Thor sat, beaming, with his lower lip between his teeth. All of his muscles were flexed, and his knuckles had gone white where his hands held each other in his lap. The twins' house was the first stop, however, so they didn't get to overhear the outcome of the conversation. They were forced to wait for Sif's text an hour later, which was triumphant, and still predatory.

The weather turned wet that evening, and the spicy scent of damp earth and decaying leaves clung to everything. It followed them into the house on the soles of their shoes and dropped into the floorboards, where it would live until spring.

When their homework was finished, the twins huddled up under blankets on the sofa and Thor resumed Dracula, pausing whenever Loki offered half a peanut butter cup or truffle. They ate their dinner slowly rather than wolfing it down like they usually did, wanting to use the pleasure of the food to pass the time before bed. They showered that evening instead of waiting until morning, knowing it would be another soothing time-killer and would let them sleep later. Loki went first and then did dilator therapy while Thor washed.

Freyr had gone to bed but Frigga was still awake and working when Loki walked with painstaking silence into Thor's room and settled beside him, sighing as he pulled the quilt over her. She was wearing another satin nightgown that slid beneath his skin, letting his hands glide over her body in long liquid passes. Thor wore nothing but the faint scent of soap from his shower.

After half an hour of slow melting kisses, the patch of wetness Thor had left on the nightgown was the size of an apple and the silk was stuck to Loki's hip. Loki thought it was a waste to lose pieces of Thor to the laundry and she sat up to strip off her nightgown, letting it pool on the pillow beside Thor's cheek. He pressed it to his face while it still held the warmth of her skin. She tipped him onto his back and stretched out on top of him to coax more wetness from him with kisses. She gave him her own in turn, leaking a steady mingled trickle of the clear sticky drops that were like his and the thick milky dew that was her own.

When she heard their mother's door shut for the night, Loki crept from the bed, pulled a pair of jeans from Thor's hamper, laid them along the gap under his door, and then switched on his reading lamp. Her paranoia had faded. She was confident no one would be coming around to peek in the window from the veranda now that the weather had gone wet and cold, and she couldn't remember Frigga or Freyr ever coming to this half of the balcony anyway.

It was a relief to be able to look at each other after practicing their calculated distance all day. There was Thor with all his colors—or nearly, for the blue of his eyes had gone black. Loki watched the rising and falling of his ribs and belly. She memorized the open sprawl of him, unguarded and welcoming. She followed the bobbing of the tender column of his cock, with its skin like eyelids—colored with thread-thin blood vessels and having that same faintly tacky fragility. Somehow, it was more naked than the rest of him. Its shape made her think of the way dolphins had been molded by the ocean, smooth and streamlined, meant to cut through their medium with little resistance.

Thor could see the thirst in Loki's eyes and sense the hunger in her skin. Her gaze ran over the same path again and again, like a beast in a cage, stalking from his lips to his fingers to his prick and then back up again. She moved with her legs spread and her back arched, offering her chest up to his eyes and inviting his cock to her hips as she straddled him.

He cupped her cheek and slipped his thumb between her lips, then tugged his shaft with slow tight strokes while she bit and sucked his finger.

“Do you have anything?” she whispered, when he withdrew his thumb and traced her lower lip, slicking it with her spit and feeling the way the cold weather had already chapped her skin. He wanted to catch the peeling ends between his teeth and strip them off, leaving her mouth smooth and seasoning their kisses with salted iron.

He nodded and leaned over to open his bedside drawer, then groped around a bit and brought out a little bottle for her.

He watched her pour some into her cupped palm and reach to coat her skin, seeing mostly her knuckles, but hearing all the slick bubbling pops and squelchy sucks. Then she filled her palm again and reached for him. She only had half of him wet when his head rolled on the pillow.

“Slowly,” he panted.

When she looked at his breast, it was rising higher and faster than it had been before. She loosened her grip on him and painted him with soft random strokes, keeping an eye on his breathing to gauge her success. His skin was hot against her palm. It felt fevered. She shuffled forward a little and planted her fists on the bed above his shoulders. Her hair swayed over his face and he threaded his fingers through it, capturing the damp curls and pushing them behind her ears so that the light would catch her features. Only her left half was well lit. It was the side of her face that tended to look the most stern, but also the least worried; her right eyebrow carried an expression of permanent uncertainty.

Her face was smooth as she sank. Her mouth went slack and popped open to pant her breaths against Thor's face. He willed his hips to hold still and he let his shoulders lift off the bed in their stead, arching from his neck to the base of his back, but not bucking up into her. The smile that tightened her face when she was fully seated was not for Thor. It marked a victory, and Thor offered a grin of his own in congratulations.

When she began to move, Thor moaned, and Loki slapped a hand over his mouth. His eyes went wide, but she could feel him nodding his head under her fingers. He put his hands around her waist and she dropped down onto her elbows to sway up and down his body. She watched his eyes flutter and roll back in his head until her own began to do the same. The fit was tight, but Thor's body was of no sterner stuff than her own, so it compressed inside her. It left them equally warped by each other's skin and feeling raw in their new shapes.

When Loki took her hand off Thor's mouth, she replaced it with her lips, sealing them around his and catching the tiny sounds he made. Their kisses drew the warmth that was building between their legs all the way up into their tongues. The twins squeezed their eyes shut tight, as if their lids could hold onto something, but they had only each other, and they were both falling. The head of Loki's clitoris had been dragging up and down the top of Thor's shaft the whole time she'd been riding him, fraying her nerves from both sides, and she sobbed into Thor's mouth as she spent, sending semen pulsing down the front of his cock and trickling into his fur. Thor's mind leaped ahead to when his own semen would be leaking out of Loki's pussy, dripping down around his prick, and flowing into Loki's come. The thought tipped him over into his own orgasm and he arched against her. She felt the brush of his tongue and the tap of the K in his mouth when he said her name into their kiss. She hummed and licked past his lips, rolling her head slowly, gone heavy above him with all her strings cut.

They slept for a while and when Loki opened her eyes Thor was blinking up at her with a tired smiling clarity. Kissing him felt like bending to drink from a stream. He hadn't slipped out of her yet. Their bodies were tender and sticky, both gone soft, but because he was still inside her, they could feel the contours of parts of themselves that were usually insensible in this state. The organs were no longer erotic, but had all become internal, like the belly you don't feel until it's full.

School was always a loss, but they made use of art class. Thor practiced recreating birds' nests with careful weaving; Loki designed clothes so that she could make them at home later.

She sewed the grey nightgown she'd described to Thor. He put it on as soon as she'd finished it and was still wearing it when she came to his room that night. She slid her hand beneath it, beginning at his right ankle. When she got to his knee, he bucked and stained the front of the gown. Loki felt smug—she'd had his hand all the way up her thigh on the sofa and she hadn't come. But then Thor stayed hard, so she awarded a point to him.

“You can hand wash it in cold water with mild detergent,” she said, watching his unflagging erection bob against its wet spot.

“I will, but keep going,” he whispered.

By night, they stripped each other bare with the omnipotence of eyes, tongues, and fingertips. Loki fell in love with the delicate V that framed Thor's frenulum. She would lick it with firm pointed strokes and wide flat stripes that felt molten at first and then cooled in the air, suspending Thor in pleasure. Thor found that Loki's clitoris still had the springy pink of childhood clinging to its head, and he would hold it in his mouth to shield it from the elements and feel it swell with blood. It stretched his lips into a generous O and sat comfortably on his tongue. She would trap him there between her thighs and then watch his eyes smile up at her.

They would skip showers and dip their heads to sniff each other, their faces smooth and patient. Not squeamish, shy, or critical, but curious and objective. They noted the vegetable odor of armpits, always a bit like onions by the end of the day. They tracked the progress of the musk that sat like mist amid their pubic hair, arising the second they exited the shower—if it ever left at all—and deepening steadily throughout the day until it had achieved a salted mushroom character by four in the morning. They blinked at the waxy bitterness of the ears. Nuzzled the oily sweetness of the scalp. Lingered at the savory richness of the neck. Hummed and nibbled at the nutty wheat of the limbs.

Some nights they traded lazy kisses that trailed off into dreams, but most nights they were lucky if they managed four hours of sleep.

They developed an ambivalence about orgasms that they hadn't anticipated. The pleasure was undeniable, but it was also the end of itself. They loved the helplessness it held them in and how it left them entirely exposed to each other, but it was a door that could swing open and slam shut in a span of seconds. It was also a powerful hypnotic, and they didn't like to sleep through their time together. They preferred to nudge the door ajar in tiny increments over a course of hours, so their cries were most often “Oh no, not yet” rather than “Oh God, don't stop.”

They built tension with soft kisses that trailed along necks, thighs, and breasts, moving at the pace of a sunbeam across a floor.

They curled fingers into each other to feel the wringing grip of the anus, then turned its own pressure against itself, thrilling it with the undulating stretch of knuckles.

They watched the precome leak out of each other as they knelt between spread legs and caressed each other with wet fingers. Loki was always surprised to see the fluid leaving the tip of Thor's prick instead of the base; Thor was always amazed to see liquid trickling out of the tiny slit below Loki's clitoris, and he was delighted when the droplets dipped around the curve and disappeared into her cunt.

They exhaled slowly into each other's open mouths, sometimes inhaling each other's breaths, to feel the way the molecules had been warmed by their lungs.

Thor rested on his knees and shoulders with his hands behind him, spreading his cheeks apart to let Loki slip the head of her clitoris into his hole. She pushed herself in and popped herself out, over and over, like a string of beads, while Thor twitched and panted at the smooth sliding tickle of it.

Loki would sit on Thor's face and muffle his cries with her flesh while she stroked his cock in slow twists that were timed with his breaths. To retaliate, Thor would lick up into Loki's pussy and press the tip of his nose against her hole until she squirmed and her legs trembled.

Sometimes Loki would slick her brother up with KY jelly and slide her cunt down onto his cock, then sit there, using him as a dilator. He would hold her clit in his fist and they would blink Morse code back and forth at each other. Thor was more likely to say something figurative when he could do so silently, and Loki learned the contours of her brother's gentle brain through the semaphore swipes of his eyelashes.

When their bellies felt swollen and congested and the flesh between their legs burned with tingling pressure, they would check the glowing red numbers of the clock, sigh, and submit.

Sometimes they rode the twisting slide of hands to their release, leaning into each other like punch-drunk boxers and trading heavy kisses until their eyes rolled back in their heads and their hips got wet with seed.

Sometimes Thor would crouch low and wide and ease his cock into Loki's ass while she was belly up in front of him. He had to make himself move slowly because he got halfway there just watching her like that; her eyes dark and fixed on him, her long legs raised and spread. She'd stroke herself with the same spiraling grip that he liked, and the head of her clitoris would swell and darken like fruit ripening in her fist. He'd only let himself finish when her semen was leaping out of her slit to catch in his fur. Not that he had much choice at that point; the clenching drag of her arching body around his cock would combine with her stifled cries to unravel him from prick to navel.

Sometimes it was all mouths at the same time, and it was too much stimulation and not enough stillness, and it was perfect all the same. Occasionally, Loki would shoot semen up Thor's nose in that position. He would sit up, giggling, afterward and she would quietly scold him, “Oh, don't catch it on your tongue, Thor, for God's sake use a tissue.”

Sometimes he would slide into the smooth heat of her cunt and then go still, feeling her skin slowly stretching around him. And Loki would beg him to move while it was still tight and throbbing, but he'd be stubborn, afraid to hurt her. So she'd bite him and pinch him and goad him and kick him until his blood was up and then he'd drive into her with the parity she needed from him.

Christmas break felt like a birthday present. They rose at dawn and did chores in the barn together while Freyr was at work and Frigga was still sleeping. They could kiss and laugh and squeal without the worry of waking anyone. The deer found their joy contagious, shadowing them and nuzzling them, forming a happy herd.

Frigga went out to run errands the Wednesday before the holiday and the twins had the house to themselves. They went to Loki's room, with its windows to the north and east, and stretched out in her bed to listen to the white silence of the afternoon sun. They learned that Loki's bare skin was brighter than the sheets because its surface was shiny and translucent. Their eyes glowed. Loki's hair had faded to auburn, and the red was deafening against the eggshell of ceilings, walls, and sheets.

“You look like Jolene,” Thor said, and curled closer behind her.

She lifted her right leg to let him lay his cock between her thighs. The edge of the crown dragged against the mouth of her pussy, teasing her, and the tip of his prick butted against the head of her clit. The drag of skin was dry and vicious, like the light in the room, but when they came they gave themselves wetness and Thor smeared it on all their chafed flesh like a balm.

“Like toads,” Loki said, and Thor's laughter breezed into her hair.

“Gametes on gametes.”

“Exactly.”

“Toad-sex,” Thor giggled, clinging to her hip.

“Except you're supposed to be riding on my back, half-drowning me.”

“Mmm,” Thor agreed. “And we're supposed to squirt it all into the pond.”

“Too cold to swim,” Loki yawned. “We'll do it in spring with the rest of them.”

 

The winter nights were long and dark and the cold air made the sky clear. If their homework was done and they weren't sleepy, they'd turn off all the lights in the house and drag old blankets into the yard, then lie on their backs and stare up at the stars.

Sometimes Frigga and Freyr would join them, but they were always wrapped in the same silence Thor and Loki observed while star-gazing, so their presence wasn't bothersome.

After Loki was confident that Jane was solidly ensconced with Sif, she interrogated Thor about his many celestial mistresses. Thor explained that he loved them because he recognized them. He felt mirrored in them. Caught up in their motions. He said the word gravity, and then Loki understood. They'd been born within an event horizon. Their movements were invisible and inevitable—and incomprehensible to all that was without. They could only move toward each other, blend together, and intensify. The four forces were tipped on their heads, and the weakest—gravity—had been given the reins.

Where most would have felt a powerless drowning panic at such a fate, the twins felt peace. There was innocence in inevitability. They could float in a physics that felt like it had been written just for them.

Spring brought Thor babies. Orchard Orioles and Carolina Chickadees. Despite minimal handling and the use of puppets for feedings, the latter were tame almost immediately. After they fledged, they would land on Thor's shoulders and cry for food every morning as he walked to the barn, though they were quite capable of feeding themselves—Thor had spent weeks teaching them how to do it. Freyr said they reminded him of Loki when she was a baby, spilling crocodile tears for attention.

Loki got the leftover fabric from Frigga's Fashion Week samples. She made herself airy dresses for the sticky days in May and June that she was destined to spend suffering in stuffy classrooms. She sewed flat-chested clothes for home, where she had no use for her silicone breasts. She felt nothing through them. They had become a source of loss, getting in the way of Thor's groping and pushing his chest away from hers. She made nightgowns with lace bodices that transitioned into satin at the skirt. When the twins wore them, the pink of their nipples peeked through the rose patterned tatting while the silk slid over the shifting curves of their backsides. They felt like femme fatales.

On summer nights, they still spent hours enveloped in their slow gluttonous sex. During daylight, they felt it more prudent to be swift—and far from the house.

At seven, they'd tug on Thor's boxer briefs, t-shirts, and beat up old blue jeans, then trudge out to the barn.

Halfway through their chores, Thor would slide the jeans and boxers down his twin's hips and kneel behind her as she groomed one of the horses. She'd arch her back and he'd lean in to lick the damp metallic musk from between her legs, pressing her cheeks tight against his face with dusty hands and dragging his tongue through folds and clefts until her semen fell into the fabric bunched up around her thighs.

Sometimes Loki would corner Thor in the back of an empty stall and stick her clit through the flap in the front of her borrowed boxers. Then she'd drag his head down to her hips by the hair and have him blow her while sparrows dipped and fluttered above them.

If Loki sneaked into Thor's room to suck his cock after his shower, she'd always let him finish in her mouth. Then she'd stand and push his spill between his lips as she kissed him, smiling when he swallowed it down. She did it not because she didn't like the taste, but because she loved the way it felt to feed him with her mouth. And it pleased her to think that Thor's body was going to build semen out of semen; that she was making a concentrate.

If the weather was hot, they'd get in the pond. Loki would wade in and raise the hem of her skirt so that Thor could duck under it. The tails of tadpoles would wiggle against her shins while Thor thrust his tongue up into her cunt until she came on his face.

They felt like animals, and they were relieved by it. Thor had longed for the nature buried beneath culture; Loki lured it out of him. He ate, courted, mated, bathed, and slept. He swam naked while the sun turned his skin the color of clover honey. If he got Loki dirty, he licked her clean. He rarely spoke, but often purred.

When Loki looked at him, she saw a lion, with its eyes tipped up at the corners, its mane on its shoulders, and its mouth red from feasting.

Loki felt like a bright-feathered bird. The clothes she sewed were plumage, selected to lure her mate. Short frilly skirts because he liked to put his hands under them. Button-up blouses because he liked to unbutton them. Loose pleated gowns that would stretch enough to let him inside them. Corset-shaped tops with ruffled busts that dropped as she bent over, letting him see her nipples.

On their backs in the orchard, she sang him her oldest song, telling him what his fairy would do to him and what he would do to his fairy.

From midnight to three in the afternoon, they were free to be themselves. After that, the alarm on Thor's phone would go off and the twins would let out sighs that had enough throat in them to pass for growls. They would pick the grass and leaves from each other's hair and skin, shake the spiders out of their clothes, dress, and come in from the trees to play civilized people for the rest of the evening.

Loki would help Frigga in her studio, acting as a mannequin or an extra set of hands, knowing that a month's worth of Fashion Weeks awaited her mother in September.

Thor would go riding with Freyr and help him cook dinner. After supper, they would fix up old cars with Jane, Sif, and Heimdall—who actually knew how to do such things—so that they'd have something to drive when they turned sixteen.

  


7 Ending

 

Labor Day was bittersweet. It was the last day of summer vacation, but Frigga had gone to Savannah to oversee the shipping of her collection for the shows that started Thursday, so Thor and Loki had the house to themselves and could enjoy the luxuries of sheets and pillows through the cycles of their love-making.

Freyr came home with rarities—flour and sugar—intending to make the last of the season's peaches into pie, which he hadn't done in nearly a decade. The house looked different inside when the light was still evenly split between east and west. He rarely caught it. The quiet of having the space empty was unwelcome, reminding him of his years alone after his parents left for Florida.

As he went upstairs to change his clothes, he caught a pale pink glow on the ceiling that he'd never seen before. When he traced its source he wondered when he'd fallen asleep. He was certain he'd taken up his sister's dreaming habits, for he saw an impossible thing: himself, young again, in Frigga's old room. He was naked on his back in bed with his sister asleep under his arm. Her long curls, half blond and half red, were glowing in the light and their bodies were casting their rosy tint up onto the walls and ceiling, warming the room. Freyr saw his nostrils flare and his blue eyes open. They stared back at him, blinking slowly. He saw his ribs and belly rising with deep infrequent breaths, still the pace of healthy calm. He saw his mouth curve into a guileless hello of a smile. But the left half of his upper lip was too full and it rolled back on itself to reveal teeth that were small and sharp and angled inward a bit oddly. And then the face was Thor's.

Freyr returned the smile with a faint nod and took a step back from the door, but the floorboard creaked and the sleeping girl opened eyes that were green instead of blue.

“You're home early,” Loki murmured, then slid off the bed and stepped out the veranda doors.

Freyr saw her lift a long leg up and set a foot on the railing. Saw her calf bunch up and bounce her lightly off the boards. Then he lost her legs to a honey-blond blur that half-disappeared as it folded in two, following the girl over the edge of the balcony.

The screaming shook Freyr's mind from its trap of dreaming. He heard his own panicked “No!” and then a strangled voice barking orders.

“Go down and grab her, I'm tearing up her ankle!”

“Can you hold on?” Freyr asked.

Thor was doubled over the railing, pinning himself in place by keeping his thighs parallel to his chest.

“Yes,” Thor gasped. “Go get her.”

Freyr sprinted down the steps and out the back door, running around the corner to see Loki dangling by one leg with a gash on her forehead. She had smashed into the first floor railing as she swung from Thor's arms. She kept reaching for the bars, but was unable to coordinate her limbs. Freyr grabbed her by the middle, then guided her over his shoulder with steady pressure from his hands until she dropped her free leg down behind him.

“Got her,” Freyr called, and Thor's hands released the ankle and ascended.

Loki slumped over Freyr's shoulder and he carried her toward the back door. Her bare hip smelled like clean sweat, semen, and cotton sheets where it rested against his cheek. She swayed with his steps while her hands made more hopeless attempts to steady her.

“You're all right, I've got you,” he soothed, and her fingers stopped scrabbling at his pant leg.

Thor was waiting in the doorway when Freyr came past, carrying Loki into the house and starting up the stairs to the second floor.

Loki thought she was being given a second shot at her suicide. Possibly assistance. Perhaps Freyr would pull down the ladder and take her up to the attic so she'd be able to jump from a more damaging height. Maybe he'd hold her face down in the bath.

“Thor, use the railing, I don't want you falling,” Freyr said, hearing Thor behind him on the steps.

“Where are you taking her?” Thor asked.

Thor's voice was fearful, but tinged with more anger than Loki had ever heard in it.

“Gotta get back on the horse that threw you,” Freyr said, and set Loki down in the hall at the top of the stairs.

He gripped her by the upper arm and took her to Frigga's room, pulling the key from his pocket and opening the door.

“That's the bed you two were born in,” he said, and Loki nodded in understanding; she should have tried to take her life in this room to finish the circle. “Your amniotic fluid is still in the mattress. We never bothered to buy a new one.”

He took them down the hall to his own room, next, unlocking the door and letting them in.

Loki didn't understand what she was meant to do here. There was no circuit for her to complete. She looked at Freyr, but he was watching Thor, so she followed suit.

Thor was staring at the bed as if he saw someone in it. He walked forward and pulled back the blankets, dragging them to the foot of the bed, then picked something invisible from the pillow closest to him.

“She sleeps on this side to be by the door,” Thor said.

Loki noticed the two matching depressions in the mattress and saw the light catching on the long strand of hair that was held in Thor's fingers.

“How long did she carry us?” Thor asked, turning toward Freyr, who raised his eyebrows, but smiled as he answered.

“Two hundred and seventy-six days. Full term. Not many twins make it that far.”

Thor's eyes darted to his left as he did the addition in his head.

“Odin was already dead,” Thor said.

“He was,” Freyr sighed, and he could feel Loki's heartbeat speeding up against his fingers where they still held her by the arm.

“Why didn't you tell us?” Loki asked.

“It's an awfully big secret to ask a couple kids to keep,” Freyr answered. “We were going to wait until you were settled into your thirties like we were when our folks told us. And I was raising you anyway, so I didn't see what difference it made. Hadn't realized it was already relevant to you. Wishing like hell I had told you, now, though,” he said, wiping his face with his free hand. “We thought maybe things would be different for you two.”

“They will,” Loki murmured. “We'll be the end of it.”

He squeezed her arm and took her by the shoulders, guiding her to the edge of the bed and having her sit down, then patted the space beside her and asked Thor to sit.

“Oh, Jesus, your hips,” Freyr cried, wincing as he looked Thor over.

Thor's hips were scraped raw and bruised from slamming down against the railing with the added weight of a body in free-fall. Blood had leaked down the fronts of his thighs in matching stripes.

“If I leave you two alone, can I trust you not to do anything drastic again?” Freyr asked, adding, “For the rest of your lives,” under his breath. He was looking at Loki as he spoke.

The twins shrugged.

Freyr huffed at them, shook his head, and climbed to his feet.

He came back with a tray covered in clean wet cloths, antiseptic ointment, tape, dressings, bandages, and ibuprofen. He set it down and brought the twins glasses of water, then had them swallow the painkillers.

“Thor, are you okay to wash those scrapes out in the tub?” Freyr asked.

“Yeah.”

“Sit or kneel for me, please. I don't want you standing on something hard and slippery just yet; you might still faint.”

“'Kay,” Thor said, and slipped out the door to disappear down the hall.

Freyr bent in front of Loki and picked up a damp cloth. When Loki looked, she saw her brother's face with forty-five years etched into it. Still beautiful. She didn't know how she hadn't caught it before.

“This'll sting some, honey, and I'm sorry about that,” Freyr sighed, and reached to clean the blood from her forehead. “I'll try to be quick about it.”

It wasn't as bad as it looked once the blood had been cleared away. Most of it was swelling rather than laceration. One butterfly bandage would be enough to hold it shut. The cuts on her ankles were tiny crescent-shaped punctures from Thor's fingernails and had barely bled at all. Freyr cleaned and dressed them anyway.

Thor came back smelling of Ivory soap and wearing boxer-briefs that had the waistband rolled down below his scrapes. He sat beside Loki on the bed and Freyr dabbed ointment onto him. Thor could smell his mother's skin on the sheets, layered with the perfume of the thick hand lotion she always used so that her cuticles and fingertips would be smooth and wouldn't snag delicate fabrics.

Thor had been pleased when he'd put it together, and not just because it meant that he and Loki were safe. It meant that someone loved Freyr properly; loved Frigga properly. That he and Loki were the product of something perfect. He imagined their amniotic sacs being bathed in Freyr's semen until they looked like two pearls inside his mother—a baptism that actually meant something to him.

Freyr went down to the kitchen and came back with frozen vegetables wrapped in towels to pack around Thor's shoulders. When they were in place, he sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the twins.

“You found the lump,” Loki guessed, and Freyr nodded, absentmindedly dragging a finger over his own left breast, two inches above the nipple.

“She never did the self-exams,” Freyr said, softly, shaking his head. “I decided I'd be a pest and do them every day. Figured she'd take over just to save time. I was only asking her to do them once a month. Guess it's a good thing she's so stubborn.”

“Are you why I'm like this?” Loki asked, and Freyr opened his mouth to answer, but Thor beat him to it.

“Alive?” Thor asked, glaring at her. “Yes. He's why you're alive.”

“That's not what I meant,” Loki said.

“I know what you meant,” Thor grumbled.

“Shhh,” Freyr soothed. “It's all right.”

Thor's frown faded a little. Loki's face was open and expectant, still waiting for her answer.

“Our family tree doesn't have any branches,” Freyr sighed, scrubbing a hand through his hair and laughing a little. “People around here used to say the Vanirs were vampires. Folks would leave for decades and when they came back, the new generation looked just like the old one—like they hadn't aged. The gene's been with us a long time. Grandma and Grandpa are both carriers, and your mother and I are carriers—so's Thor.”

Freyr sighed and looked back and forth between the twins.

“You two want someone to talk to? I can look into therap-”

“No,” Loki said, immediately.

“Thor, would-” Freyr began, but then shook his head and laughed at himself. “No, I suppose you wouldn't.”

Thor smiled in agreement and sagged in relief.

Freyr stared at the four bony knees that were bent around the edge of the bed in front of him. He saw the sharp lines of the shins. The knobs of the ankles and joints of the toes. The twins had grown over a quarter of an inch since summer started. Not an ounce of fat on them. All burned away.

“Y'all up for baking a few pies?” he asked.

“'Kay,” they chimed.

“Go get dressed and meet me in the kitchen.”

The mindless motions of baking soothed them with pleasant scents and textures. The tasks also required just enough attention that no one felt awkward about remaining silent. Thor blanched and peeled the peaches. Loki made the dough and rolled it, then cut neat strips for the lattice. Freyr sliced and seasoned the fruit, which was so ripe and sweet it hardly needed sugar. Thor wove the dough over the tops of the pies to look like baskets, then sprinkled extra sugar on top afterward so that the crust would have glitter and crunch.

They were still at it when Frigga got back from Savannah.

“Your forehead,” she said, rushing over and pushing Loki's curls aside to better see the bruised and bandaged lump. “What happened?”

Loki opened her mouth, staring at her mother, but nothing came out, so she shut it again. Freyr squeezed Loki's shoulders.

“I've got it,” he said. “You two keep an eye on the pies. If the edges start to get too brown, wrap them in foil.”

Thor watched the pies. Loki watched their parents. They'd gone outside. Freyr was sitting on the ground, leaning back against the base of the ash tree. Frigga was in the tire swing with a hand held over her mouth.

Thor was fanning the pies to cool them faster when their parents came back inside. The house smelled like browned butter and peaches. It was only three, but felt later. Thor watched his mother's face. When she noticed he was looking she seemed to shake herself out of something and then came over to kiss him on the cheek. She had to stretch up on her toes just a little to get her lips to his face now, but she wouldn't let him bend. She pushed his hair behind his shoulders with the backs of her hands and then lightly rubbed the outsides of his upper arms, brushing his skin, but not shifting his muscles.

“He said you'll be pretty sore by morning,” Frigga murmured. “You stay in bed if you need to, all right?”

Thor nodded.

Freyr asked if anyone wanted to go riding. Thor said he wanted to, but it would irritate his hips, and suggested they walk with the deer instead. They picked up a few leftover peaches and went to the barn.

Loki was barefoot in a white sundress with a ruched bust. She liked the way white fabric made the structure of a garment come to the fore. Frigga was wearing the same thing. The dimple in her left breast was just visible above the low neckline. She poured herself a bourbon and took a long pull, then stared down into the drink, swirling it in the glass and drawing a deep breath to catch its caramel perfume.

Loki couldn't take her eyes from Frigga's face; her mother hadn't looked at her once since coming in the house. It made the sickly-sweet note that clung to the peach pits on the counter top stick in her throat. The way the fabric of her dress stood away from her body left her feeling naked. The semen that had dried on her thighs and hip was stretching and cracking as her legs shook, and she feared that little flakes of it were floating down onto the floor around her feet.

“Used to have nightmares about you two falling from that veranda,” Frigga said, softly, taking a seat at the kitchen table. She still didn't look up.

“But we didn't fall,” Loki said.

“No, you jumped.”

Loki felt sweat traveling down the insides of her arms in stuttering lines, tickling her skin and making it itch. She wiped them on her dress.

“Will Thor hate me for it?” Loki breathed, and Frigga finally looked at her. Her eyebrows were turned up in the centers, just like Loki's were.

“No,” Frigga said, and the sound was slow and soothing, but still not enough.

“How do you know?”

Frigga's shoulders relaxed and she she let out a long breath, then tipped her head toward the ceiling to stare up at the cobwebs.

“Because he's just like his father.”

Loki's eyebrows pulled down and folded up in the middle. It was true, she supposed. Thor and Freyr were both quiet and sweet and had a knack for care-taking. But there was no precedent for this. Loki had almost severed them. Unwritten the physics of their universe.

“I left him,” Frigga said. “Tried to, anyway.”

Loki feared she wouldn't be able to tell that she was pissing herself until she heard the urine spattering on the kitchen floor, so she clenched her crotch as a precaution.

“He knew me so well I couldn't stand it. It was like walking around without any skin. Having him see all the mess underneath,” Frigga said, shaking her head. “He took the head shots I sent to Ford. I ran off to model as soon as I finished high school. He only saw me in magazines. Had more free time when I started designing, but I still didn't come home. Convinced Odin to elope so I wouldn't have to face Freyr at our wedding. Mom was the one who told him I was married. He called me up to say 'Congratulations, S, he's the luckiest man alive.'”

Frigga's face was wet, but smooth. She drained her bourbon and sat, gazing over her shoulder out the back door. The tire swing was slowly spinning in the breeze above its patch of dirt. The cricket that lived under the back steps was singing calmly, accustomed to having conversation drifting out of the house overhead.

“How do we know they're not just being polite?” Loki whispered, and Frigga laughed and gave Loki a long smile that sent feeling creeping back into her limbs.

“It would be pretty hard to keep up the act for twenty-six years, don't you think?”

“How can they stand being so nice about everything?” Loki asked.

“They're not being nice,” Frigga said, with a gentle lift of her shoulders and a shake of her head. “They're just being.”

“Being what?”

“Being,” Frigga laughed. “Themselves. Right now.”

Loki stared at the floor.

“I was worried about the same thing at first,” Frigga admitted. “But Freyr said he'd have to live in the past to stay angry about a thing that happened yesterday. That he'd have to hold onto things he didn't even want if he was going to feel wronged.”

“Thor was angry with me once.”

“Once?” Frigga gasped, in mock horror. “For how long?”

“A day and a half.”

“A day and a half,” Frigga repeated, wheezing out the words and slumping forward over the table as her shoulders shook with laughter. “I used to have fights with Odin that went on for months.”

“Why?”

“Because he was wrong,” Frigga answered.

Loki snorted.

Frigga poured two glasses of lemonade, then put two spoonfuls of sugar in each of them and stirred them until the grains dissolved, clinking the spoon on the crystal with a clear pleasant sound. She took Loki out back to lie on a blanket in the grass and talk couture while they waited for Thor and Freyr to get back from the barn.

Dinner was deliberately light so that everyone would have plenty of room for seconds of dessert. Their bodies were desperate for something rich and sweet after all the stress.

Loki was already in Thor's bed when he got back from his shower, waiting under the blankets with the lights on and the door open. Discretion hadn't done her any good, so she'd discarded it.

She watched him peel off the pieces of plastic he'd taped to his hips to keep his bandages dry. His movements were stiff, but his forehead was smooth.

“Mom says I get to stay home and wipe your ass tomorrow,” Loki said, while Thor turned out the lights and climbed into bed.

“Are you paraphrasing?”

“Not by much.”

“How's your head?” he asked.

“Throbbing,” she answered, threading her fingers through his as he settled beside her on his back.

When Thor felt the bed shaking, he flipped on his reading lamp and grabbed a tissue, but when he turned and reached to dry Loki's tears, he found out she was laughing.

 

**Author's Note:**

> please don't comment or repost.


End file.
